Counting crowds with mobile phone and Twitter data

When protests or political gatherings take place, how do organisers estimate how many people have attended? And why is this number often different to what the police report?

In this talk, Federico Botta explains how we can use data from mobile phones and Twitter to make surprisingly accurate estimates of the number of people in a given location at a given time. Might this provide a new answer to the age-old question of how to count crowds?

Federico Botta is a PhD student at the University of Warwick. His interests range from the analysis of complex and real-world networks to computational social sciences, with a strong focus on large behavioural datasets.