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Dr. Fred Roberts: In any scenario for evacuating: New York city
the Port Authority bus terminal is going to play an absolutely essential role.
And the Port Authority bus terminal is the worlds busiest bus terminal.
Its got almost of a quarter of a million passengers pass through everyday
A facility that was built in the late 1940's, after Hurricane Sandy, the lines where so long
They extended out onto the street. So they have a major crowd management problem
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Dr. Mubbasir Kapadia: The goals of this project are to develop and
end-to-end software solution for crowd behavior.
Andrew Dobson: The Port Authority is interested in what may happen
in case there is some sort of, natural disaster. Having temporary
construction barriers perhaps changing completely the layout of
certain floors.
Dr. Mubbasir Kapadia: The first step in this process is to use
state of the art LiDAR technology to create a virtual reconstruction
which essentially gives us a photorealistic 3D virtual navigable
Dr. Jie Gong: And the purpose to using cutting edge remote sensing technologies
is to capture up to date geometric information.
Victor Baquero: We set up the tripod, the laser scanning goes on top of it.
Yi Yu: Than we put this target around it
and put it into some overlap location with the the next scan.
Victor Baquero: So that later in the computer we can find these targets and put the pieces together.
Yi Yu: And have very high accuracy to the millimeter level.
Prarthana Raja: All these scans have a lot of noise, a lot of people
and theres also a lot overlap and we had delete all the overlaps,
clean out all the scans.
Dr. Mubbasir Kapadia: The next step is to use state of the art
computer motion technology to reconstruct the movement of the crowd
in the Port Authority bus terminal from empirical observations.
Once we have these two things, we develop computation models of how humans
actually move in the Port Authority.
Andrew Dobson: We want to make this very general so that its
not just for the Port Authority. The idea is we want to create a general
tool that can be used for all kinds of public facilities.
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