October 2022 marked one of the world’s most tragic crowd crush during the Halloween Festival in Itaewon district in South Korea. The crowdedness of people with no limitation in number along the only 40 meters long and 3.2 meters wide road, with steep slope, prevented the people to realize the situation. And this was the cause of crowd crush leading to the death toll of 157 and a lot of injured victims on October 29, 2022 at 22:15 p.m. (Local time).
The tragedy inspired Chonsawat Naknam, a College of Computing student who was doing the AI Project, to create an innovation “AI count of the number of people at an exhibition”. Chonsawat said AI can do more complicated analysis that human brain or eyes, with more precision. This increases convenience to life and can suitably be applied to many situations. In his project, AI counts the number of guests to an exhibition or a crowded place by indicating which zone is the most crowded. In general, human eyes can anticipate the number of people at a place, but this takes time and is highly erroneous.
“With AI nowadays, it is not necessary to waste time on that, for AI can state how many people there are in just a wink of an eye through a camera. There’s no need to count, for it can be directed to the point and the tragedy like crowd crush can be done away with, such as the one in South Korean Itaewon, which is known all over the world. AI counts the people and traces people walking around an event. When there are too many people, the system will give out warning or show a color pattern at the crowded area, thus lessening possible death from crowd crush. Any area can be made safer with AI,” explain Chonsawat.
Visit the AI Project prototype that counts people at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iS36ATOdNMpgQ8ERZ6UnZUECEMNnx6DL/view?ts=6361f0ef
The Bachelor of Science Program in Artificial Intelligence Program is open for application today. High school students wishing to be part of the College of Computing of Khon Kaen University should enjoy thinking, be creative, think systematically and can use these traits to write algorithms, steps and orders for computation and solution of any problem. Students should possess empathetic characteristics and want to solve problems for big groups of people, possess basic mathematics knowledge and English language for communication and searching of international information so that their AI can be applied in reality in the present and the future world.
News: Jiraporn Prathomchai
