Analysis of visitors’ mobility patterns through random walk in the Louvre Museum

This paper proposes a random walk model to analyze visitors' mobility patterns in a large museum. Visitors' available time makes their visiting styles different, resulting in dissimilarity in the order and number of visited places and in path sequence length. We analyze all this by comparing a simulation model and observed data, which provide us the strength of the visitors' mobility patterns. The obtained results indicate that shorter stay-type visitors exhibit stronger patterns than those with the longer stay-type, confirming that the former are more selective than the latter in terms of their visitation type.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 4 table

Saving Human Lives: What Complexity Science and Information Systems can Contribute

We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do not provide a good picture of the actual system behavior, because they neglect feedback loops, instabilities and cascade effects. The complex and often counter-intuitive behavior of social systems and their macro-level collective dynamics can be better understood by means of complexity science. We highlight that a suitable system design and management can help to stop undesirable cascade effects and to enable favorable kinds of self-organization in the system. In such a way, complexity science can help to save human lives.Comment: 67 pages, 25 figures; accepted for publication in Journal of Statistical Physics [for related work see http://www.futurict.eu/

The use of the brine shrimp (Artemia salina) in aquaculture

In view of the need'for research on the practical use of the brine shrimp Artemia salina in aquaaulture, our research team at the State University of Ghent (Belgium) is studying the following aspects : 1- The automatized mass-culturing of larvae. 2- The controlled production of cysts. 3- The comparative study of geographical strains. 4- The study of the metabolism of the cysts.Pour couvrir les besoins en recherche sur l'utilisation pratique du Branchiopode Artemia saling pour l’aquaculture, une équipe scientifique de l'Université d’Etat de Gand (Belgique) étudie les points suivants : 1- Culture de masse automatisée des larves. 2- Production contrôlée d'oeufs de durée. 3- Etude comparative des différentes variétés géographiques. 4- Etude du métabolisme des oeufs de durée

Finding patterns in urban tourist behaviour: a social network analysis approach based on TripAdvisor reviews

Developments in ICT and the massive growth in social media usage have increased the availability of data on travel behaviour. This brings an array of new possibilities to improve destination management through Data-driven decisions. This data, however, needs to be analysed and interpreted in order to be beneficial for destination management. Different kinds of methodologies and data have already been applied to analyse spatial behaviour of tourists between and within destinations. The novelty of our paper in this sense that we apply a relational approach by conducting a network analysis methodology on a readily available big data source: user generated content (UGC) from TripAdvisor. The collected data from the city of Antwerp, Belgium shows how locals, Belgians, Europeans and non-Europeans have distinct review patterns, but also shows recurring behavioural patterns. By comparing the relational constellation of the review network to the spatial distribution of central and peripheral attractions, hotels and restaurants, we discuss the added value of social network analysis on UGC for translating (big) data into applicable information and knowledge. The results show a dominant position of a limited number of clustered attractions in the historic city centre, and shows how geographical proximity and relational proximity are interrelated for international reviewers but less for domestic reviewers. This finding is translated into a set of recommendations for policy makers and destination managers trying to accomplish a better distribution of tourists over the entire destination