Evacuation research wins best paper award

On Friday 29th September 2017, at the 9th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence in Cyprus, Dr Natalie van der Wal and her colleague Dr Daniel Formolo (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) received the Best Paper Award for their paper entitled 'Simulating Collective Evacuations with Social Elements'.

Dr Natalie van der Wal, currently at Vrije Universiteit, stated: "It is very encouraging that our work on including socio-cultural elements in evacuation modelling is recognised by our peers. The aim is to make evacuation models more realistic and ultimately save more lives".

This work is part of the European project IMPACT. In 2018, Dr Natalie van der Wal will continue this research at Leeds University Business School, during her EU Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship with supervisor Professor Wandi Bruine de Bruin in the Centre for Decision Research.