Mobile Phone Data Offers Tool for Estimating Crowd Size, New Research Suggests

Mobile phone data and mobile Twitter use are helpful in estimating crowd sizes, said researchers at the Data Science Lab at Warwick Business School in the U.K. “Using a football stadium and an airport as case studies, we present evidence of a strong relationship between the number of people in restricted areas and activity recorded by mobile phone providers and the online service Twitter,” they said in a paper. “Our findings suggest that data generated through our interactions with mobile phone networks and the Internet may allow us to gain valuable measurements of the current state of society.” Measuring crowd size is difficult, as evidenced by “the hugely varying estimates we see of the number of people at protests,” said Federico Botta, lead researcher on the project. “We found that this automatically generated data provides an excellent basis for estimating the size of a crowd. Quick and accurate measurements of crowd size could be of vital use for police and other authorities charged with avoiding crowd disasters."