A preventable tragedy. A call for action.

A young girl at Texas A&M is fighting for her life. She was crushed along with scores of others at the horrendous stampede that happened on the evening of Nov 5th?at the Astroworld event. A smart science student with?a?confirmed summer internship for next year, she had a bright future ahead of her. And now a ventilator tube is keeping that flickering hope from vanishing forever.

The girl is an Indian American. She went to a Texas public university. The event happened in my state. This could be my daughter.

Some events hit hard and remind us of how life can turn upside down in a moment. They also challenge us to think about what can be done about it.

This tragedy happened in an industry that I watch closely given my large client base. There are solutions available today with which technology can play a major role in reducing the chances of another such event.

Here are a few suggestions.

Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence:?Every 12 years, over 100 million people descend upon Prayagraj,?a northern city in India, during the Kumbh Mela. It is the largest religious gathering on earth and stampedes used to be a common story at this event. In 2019, the organizers deployed artificial intelligence at the integrated command and control center. Live images captured through drones and other sources were fed into a repository where machine learning algorithms predicted the possibility of a stampede in real time. Security personnel were then deployed for rapid action based on the hot spots as they emerged on the dashboards at the command center. By all accounts, this was a huge success.

Compared to the massive scale witnessed at the Kumbh Mela, live entertainment events are much more manageable.

Social Listening and live coordination:?The ubiquity of social media has meant that all such events have multiple feeds, tweets, and updates pouring into the various platforms. It offers valuable insight into the popularity of an event, quality of entertainment, as well as potential danger lurking in the background. This data from a live fan base has been used effectively in other contexts. For example, the Formula E car racing circuit currently uses live fan data to best engage with every live viewer. Data from over 400M viewers is crunched and the resulting insights affect the marketing strategies and increase fan engagement for the race.

If similar strategies were used at live events and in conjunction with local security arrangements, it would be possible to predict hotspots and prevent bad outcomes.

Demand and Capacity management: The transportation and hospitality industry has long perfected the art of maximizing revenue from a limited amount of capacity available at their disposal. For instance, airline seats are a perishable commodity once the flight takes off. Therefore, tickets are sold at specific prices based on time horizon, class of seat, competitive rates, promotions, and several parameters. Years of research into this field of yield management has helped airlines maximize the revenue per seat sold on a given flight.

For live events, the space is limited much like it is in the transportation industry. However, unlike the reserved seats, there probably is greater flexibility in how many tickets are sold for a given event. If revenue consideration?is causing?the number of tickets sold to be greater than actual capacity, then there are much better and safer ways of achieving the same outcome. It has been successfully deployed at airlines, hotels, and cruise lines without sacrificing safety.

These are just some best practices to make entertainment safer. It is time to take advantage of them.

It has been 5 days since the tragedy took away 8 lives and left hundreds injured. The reverberations of this accident are being felt globally. With normal life returning gradually, people are looking forward to movies, concerts, and live events. The world has suffered for too long under the pandemic and the enthusiasm is understandable.

Live events are meant to bring joy. Let’s keep them that way.?