/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/madsack/ATSNMOH6TFGIJPQ7BMUYKJ57LQ.jpg "Australia: Sydney celebrates its 45th Mardi Gras parade")
LGBTQIA+ parade in Sydney
How Sydney used high tech to control crowds at the Mardi Gras parade
The 45th Mardi Gras Parade in Sydney.
© Source: Getty Images
Sydney Noted visitors to this year’s Mardi Gras parade may have noticed the new security cameras on Sydney’s famous Oxford Street. The devices are equipped with data analysis software to monitor crowd mood and intensity. This was to prevent mass panic.
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These methods aren’t entirely new: a technology called crowd sensing was already used at the 2012 Olympic Games in London. This made it possible to direct visitors via smartphone in such a way that mass gatherings could be avoided. The city administration in the South Korean capital of Seoul had a real-time crowd monitoring system in place. This system also works over mobile data, but according to media reports, it was not in use on the fateful Saturday evening in October last year. At that time, more than 150 people died in a stampede in a narrow alley during Halloween celebrations in Itaewon District. It is said that about 100,000 young men were on the streets.
Thousands of visitors after the outbreak of the epidemic
In order to avoid such a tragic situation, the Australian city of five million people wanted to take precautions. After the Mardi Gras parade, where gays, lesbians and transgender people have paraded down Oxford Street every year since 1978, had to stop during the pandemic, a particularly large number of people were expected.
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Read more after the announcement
This year’s parade also culminated in Sydney World Pride 2023, a major event for the global LGBTQIA+ community, where LGBTQIA+ is short for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Asexual and Other Sexual Minority Community. Even Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was among the thousands who took part in the colorful march through the city on Saturday night and celebrated with the community.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the Mardi Gras parade.
© Source: IMAGO / AAP
The program recognizes people’s moods
In the interest of the safety of the demonstrators, the march was reported, according to the local daily newspaper.Sydney Morning HeraldCCTV cameras with data analysis software have been installed along the road for the first time this year. I watched the mood and the density of the crowd. In addition, technology has been used that counts cell phones by radio frequency measurement, thus it can detect that there are too many people in one place.
According to the media report, CCTV software can identify the average mood of an audience by creating rows that categorize visitor facial expressions as happy, neutral, sad, and angry. The software can also recognize the speed at which the group is moving. This allowed the organizers to determine if there was a bottleneck anywhere along Oxford Street, which could lead to the stampede. In an emergency, the data could have been transmitted quickly to the local police, for example to redirect people to less crowded areas.
Read more after the announcement
Read more after the announcement
Privacy should remain the same
The cameras will now be disassembled again after the show. The organizers assured the local newspaper that the CCTV software was not used for surveillance and, in principle, does not collect any personal data. So the technology does not allow facial recognition and cannot track individuals from one place to another.
A similar technology is also being discussed in Germany: according to a report by “Pforzheim newspaperAnd the dpa news agency from last year, a new program called Escape will be used in the 2024 European Football Championships in Germany. The program is said to have been developed in collaboration with the Stuttgart police to prevent disasters such as the Duisburg Love Parade in 2010, where more than 20 people were crushed in a crowd.
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