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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show.
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You know I'm big on promoting good communication in fire science and outside fire science.
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How to communicate fire problems to all the stakeholders is one of the main challenges that we have today and that the future fire protection engineers will have to be better at.
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Simply that is.
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But communication good communication comes with some prerequisites, and one of those prerequisites is that we actually understand each other, which is not necessarily granted, especially when we talk about technical terms across multiple disciplines.
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Often than not that you have to talk to your colleague who specializes in computer science, you have to talk to an architect, you have to talk to an electrician, someone who's managing water supply, etc.
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There are some terms, even very basic terms, that will be understood differently by those people.
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Therefore, having some sort of a shared glossary is an extremely, extremely useful tool for our practice.
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For fire safety engineering at large, we do not really have a shared glossary.
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There are some stuff like ISO standards on nomenclature, etc.
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But it's not what I'm talking about in this episode.
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Today's podcast episode is about glossary for research on human crowd dynamics.
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It's a second edition of this glossary and it includes a lot of stuff related to evacuation, which is, of course, a huge part of fire safety engineering.
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And, what's interesting, this is a community effort, a bunch of people that sat down together and agreed on how we should refer to some very basic, fundamental, most important terms for the human evacuation or human crowd dynamics research.
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As the second version has been published in open access and links are, of course, in the show notes, I've chosen to invite some people into the podcast to talk over why you did and how you actually manage building a glossary that's useful for the whole community and, as I said, it's a massive effort.
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So the list of authors is is incredible, and the organizing committee itself that's julianne adrian, nicolai boda, thomas Chattagnon, alessandro Corbetta, john Drury, claudio Feliciani, anna Zibin, enrico Ronchi and Ezel Usten.
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And out of this very, very long list of amazing people who committed to this resource, I've invited Professor Enrico Ronchi from Lund, who has been in the podcast multiple times and he has been involved in organizing the first meeting that started this glossary, and well, you'll been in the podcast multiple times and he has been involved in organizing the first meeting that started this glossary, and well, you'll hear in the podcast.
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And I've also invited Essel Usten from Jülich Forschungszentrum, who is the corresponding author of the second edition, so we have a good representation from the origins of the resource, from the recent update of the resource tells a lot of interesting things.
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You will learn some stuff about evacuation, some stuff that we perhaps understand differently than others.
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You'll learn how to build a glossary.
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You'll learn how a great community project in the sphere of fire safety engineering looks like.
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So very worth it.
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Stay with us.
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Let's spin the intro and jump to the episode.
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With us, let's spin the intro and jump to the episode.
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Welcome to the Firesize Show.
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My name is Wojciech Wigrzynski and I will be your host.
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The FireSense Show is into its third year of continued support from its sponsor, ofar Consultants, who are an independent, multi-award-winning fire engineering consultancy with a reputation for delivering innovative safety-driven solutions.
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If you're keen to find out more or join OFR Consultants during this exciting period of growth, visit their website at ofrconsultantscom.
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And now back to the episode.
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Hello everybody, I am joined today by Esl Usten from Yulish Forging Centre, IS7.
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Nice to meet you.
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Hi, wojciech, nice to meet you as well.
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Thank you for the invitation.
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And our common guest, I guess, enrico Ronchi from Lund.
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Hey, enrico Hi.
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Wojciech, very nice to see you and hear you again and thanks again for the invitation.
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How are recruitments for your ERC going?
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Did you open some positions already?
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Well, you know, formally the project starts in October, but I hired the first PhD student.
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So I have the first one in but you know, four more people to go.
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I know I can imagine.
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That's why I'm opening the podcast.
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There's the biggest amount of listeners right now.
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If you're looking for a job in the evacuation space, Enrico, you call him.
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Yeah research on human crowd dynamics.
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A second edition of that open access document has been published.
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So henceforth I've invited some of the people from the very, very long list of people on the first page to talk about the document.
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I've reflected I have not covered the first edition of that glossary, so perhaps in this interview we can go a little bit back to the past and perhaps let's discuss, like why human crowd researchers, human crowd dynamics researchers, have sit down in one room to make a common glossary for them.
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I was contacted by some research at University of Eindhoven.
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It was Alessandro Corbet and Federico Toschi.
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They were aware of this Lorenz Center in the Netherlands, which is like an interesting concept because it allows to organize workshop one week long and they provide all the logistics so a venue, food, accommodations and everything for workshops of a size of about 40, 50 scientists.
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And then he approached me and he said you know why we don't do something multidisciplinary on the topic of psychology and physics of human crowd dynamics?
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And that's where we started thinking about this.
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Okay, we bid for this because it's on a competitive process.
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It was the two of them myself, armin Seyfried from Jülich was involved and also John Drury.
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That is a psychologist, is Ann Templeton's PhD supervisor you probably hear his name a lot if you work in evacuation because he's one of the big names in psychology there.
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And we got this.
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We won the bid and we had this event.
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It was one week long.
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It's a fantastic concept because, again, you are basically sitting in a common share space for one week.
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A bunch of brilliant minds I mean, I don't want to make it sound elitist, but it's kind of by invitation.
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So we tried to have a group of a mix of fire engineers.
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So I was the fire engineer there and I invited a couple of colleagues that work in fire engineering.
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But there were psychologists, there were physicists, there were also people working on computer science, and all with the shared interest in this topic of crowd dynamics, which is very linked to evacuation.
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And in this week we had planned a set of activities.
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First we were doing this kind of like pitch of our research because not everyone knew each other.
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And then, among these activities, one thing that we said you know, if you have a psychologist sitting in the same room with a physicist, it's very likely that they don't talk the same language.
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So we said, okay, one important thing that we need to do for the whole community is to have a shared glossary where we can understand each other, because, you know, understanding each other is the first step to be able to work together.
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And that's where the idea came.
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And during this week we had, like, some sessions entirely dedicated to having working groups that were drafting some definitions, first of all to identify what were topics that were important to cover and define, and then try to define those.
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And the outcome of this workshop, one of the outcomes of this workshop was actually this first edition of the glossary which, again keeping in mind that the core of the work was done in person in one week, it's quite impressive.
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But I mean, if you put 40, 50 researchers in a room and you give them the freedom to think, good things are going to come out of this.
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So it's quite an interesting concept.
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I can comment on your idea of this symposium.
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We don't do this enough in modern science.
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For some reason we don't have time for this in modern science.
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If you can reflect on that, like how often you have time to slow down, sit down with a bunch of peers and really really focus on one thing, like if you think, like 1920s nuclear physics, that's what the conferences were.
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You were meant to go there, show some ideas, sit down and confer, talk to each other, right?
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Not like today's modern rush 15 minutes, you're out of time, next one, next one, next one coffee break, dinner.
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Go home right and rush to your plane.
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Oh man, I'm jealous and I congratulate that you have first found that concept.
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Congratulations to Lawrence Center for organizing a venue, because modern science is really striving for things like that.
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And if the glossary is one of the outcomes of that meeting, then fantastic.
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At least we have something to chat about.
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And moving from that first edition to second edition, you just wanted another conference, is that?
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the reason no, no, no, no, no, no Maybe SL can describe that, because that came from Jülich.
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Then yes, exactly.
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So the second edition is actually also coming from not understanding each other in our department.
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So we were trying to conduct a research.
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So before we started recording, I told you guys that on my PhD I was working on motivation.
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And at some point in our department there is one person mostly Shrivey, but he's a computer scientist and we decided to simulate motivation, so make a pedestrian model out of it.
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And then we sat down, we tried to understand each other a lot and after a couple of months we realized that we have no understanding of each other at all.
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And during that time we were constantly checking the first glossary to be able to effectively communicate with each other.
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Right, but in the end we thought, okay, for example, we were talking about motivation, but motivation as a concept wasn't included in the first glossary.
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So we thought, okay, maybe there are also more concepts that we can think about.
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Then we had some internal meetings some other people in ULEs were included in the project as well and we decided, okay, maybe this should not be an inside project, but rather then we should do the second edge.
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Then the first thing we did, we contacted former organizers.
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So Enrico, I think all the former organizers apart from Federico responded yes, and so we created our organizational committee and then we talked about it.
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So what should we do?
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Should we make it a chill process without rushing, without meeting, without trying to create a workshop or something like that, make everything online or face-to-face?
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And in the end, we decided to do a really chill and long process without pressuring ourselves, purely online, which we can do, all of us can do as a side project, yeah, as like a side from what we are actually doing, but we can also focus on this from time to time.
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And, yeah, we just created the stages, like, we suggested concepts, we voted on these concepts, we created writing groups, we wrote all the concepts which are voted above the threshold, for example.
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And yeah, so, rather than meeting in an intense way for one week or a couple of days, I think we did it in one year, or maybe plus a couple of months of days, I think we did it in one year or maybe plus a couple of months.
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Well, time efficiency is another thing, but it's good to hear that projects like this can be also completed in a modern way of science, no matter how much I hate the modern way of science teams meetings and stuff like that but it's good that you can also pull something out of this modern way.
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A question that immediately comes to my head is what granularity of definitions you think about.
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Like, because you said motivation was a concept for you and that's probably some high level definition.
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I would say A definition of evacuation.
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This is the fire science show.
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I know the glossary is on human crowd dynamics, but the audience is definitely interested in the evacuations.
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Evacuation is a high-level concept.
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I guess how deep you go with those definitions, because eventually you have to reach a point where the definitions only make sense for this narrow group of people who are studying this particular thing and this definition will bring no value to others who are studying something completely else.
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So how did you decide on how big chunks to define mutually within those I don't know 40-ish scientists of different fields in the room?
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So the first thing, maybe I can directly say this we didn't impose that many rules on concept definitions.
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Okay, so what was important for us?
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That the writing groups should write what they feel this is appropriate for our interdisciplinary communication or understanding.
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And I mean while editing, since I haven't been working on all these concepts, I only worked on the concepts that we wrote in our writing group and I haven't been involved also in recall, probably, but during the editing I I read all of them intensively and, from what I'm seeing, everybody tried to focus on given a general context plus what that particular concept means in our language and, if I can add something, I mean, the only few rules that we had was that each concept should not be too long.
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So I think we had something like 200 words, like they couldn't have one page just on one concept.
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And if it was, if there were sub-concepts, then we should break it down into concept and sub-concept.
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The second thing we had a very long discussion on references because, you know, we didn't want this to be an exercise of people pushing for their own research or their own papers.
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So, if you look actually at the definitions, we don't have references in them, and that's a deliberate thing that we did because, as I said, we wanted this to be a shared common understanding rather than.
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You know, I am the one with more muscles and I'm going to push in what I think is the definition, because I wrote this in paper X or paper Y.
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So I think that's a very good starting point that we had, because then it gave a bit more peace of mind to people that okay, my definition is not going to be referenced there anyway.
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So then I can work together with others to find something that everyone understands and can make use of.
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Another aspect which is important, as I say, was the process because making a bit of a step back, not everyone wrote everything, as I said, so we had some sort of a process for splitting definitions and trying to have, you know, a reasonable workload for all of us to begin with, because first we had to you know draft concepts and then define those, refine them and then everyone will read everything.
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But you know, at the beginning the drafting was done in chunks by different people, different subgroups, for different concepts, and that also, you know, if you have to write five definitions, you can put a lot of time in those, rather than if you need to write you know a hundred of them, and you know that made the process much smoother because we could have you know someone that was, because we could have you know someone that was, and we also made sure that people that were involved in the definitions, but also there was at least someone that was super keen on having that, or having proposed it or voted for it to be.
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So we had, like, some expert in that very topic for each of the definition, along with, maybe, people that were outsiders, but they were on another field but still had to understand what was going on, because that was the challenge that we had right, because we had four main disciplines.
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We had physics, psychology, computer science and engineering, and so again, okay physics, social science, engineering, computer science, okay.
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Yes, so you know, sometimes the communication is not as easy between those fields.
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That's the point of making a glossary to make it.
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Yeah, indeed, indeed indeed.
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So, as I mentioned writing groups, so the definitions were split among writing.
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What consisted of the writing group?
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Was it just a group of, let's say, engineering specialists talking about engineering concepts?
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Or you mixed people together and put them in working groups?
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in each group we put all the people from all disciplines, okay, um, so what is it?
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The minimum was four, because we had four, let's say, discipline category.
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So either four people, five people or six people I don't remember the exact numbers, but in in each of them there was at least one either psychologist, sociologist, engineer, computer scientist or physicist, if I can come back to what Enrico said about also the citations and references.
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It's also, like you know, we kind of abuse them in this or we use them a lot in the science because of the way how scientific achievement is being tracked A lot of them, let's be fair.
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You said that someone could perhaps try to put a definition or cite their own work because that's going to reflect better on them in their scientific assessment.
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And while I believe in this, you know breadcrumbs, pathway to the original concepts and highlighting contributions of people who came before us in the world of science, I also see value, like you had 40 people in the room who are experts within their own fields and what you've created.
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I've picked a term from Roger Harrison from afar.
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He used the term community wisdom.
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You know, describing some ways how smoke control definitions were made in the 90s, like there was a committee and they together decided this is the best way and he referred to that as community wisdom and I think this is a really elegant term.
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Perhaps it needs a definition in some glossary of terms describing groups of people, but I find it very pleasant to use.
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You said general context and then explaining what it means.
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Do we have an example that would be closer to the world of fire, perhaps evacuation definitions, where you came up first with a broad definition and then had to narrow it down.
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If you look at, for instance, the definition of egress and egressibility, we actually decide to merge those two together and you know we first start with a very simple sentence explaining what egress is so like okay, people leaving or exit the space, which is quite intuitive to understand for everyone and then we go more in depth into explaining how this is linked to other concepts like evacuation, how it's linked to accessibility when we talk about aggressability.
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So, starting from something that really everyone can understand, even if they are not specifically involved in that area, and then going more in depth into the nitty-gritty details of the definition, so that even the one that is into that area could see themselves, they could be able to recognize themselves into these definitions.
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Because the challenge with everything that is kind of standardized in here you know I come with my experience with ISO and all the standardization groups so you want people to be able to read things and recognize themselves in those things.
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You don't want to have people reading some definition, reading some text, and say, oh, I would have never written it like this.
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So often it's better to write something more general, more agreeable in a sense, so that people don't hate it, than have something very specific that maybe a specific group will like a lot but maybe someone will hate it.
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So that's a bit of the challenge when you write this kind of documents that it's more important people don't hate it because they will use it than not that someone super loved a specific definition and I see this was the same in my experience because I was involved in the glossary for ISO fire safety group and it's the same thing.
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Sometimes people are picking on one definition because they were hating something and things will never progress.
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So it's much better to have things that people can agree with to some extent than have people only a portion of people loving that and another one hating it, because we need to have something that everyone uses.
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What level of consensus have you sought?
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What was it like?
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A unanimous decision that, yes, this is the final definition.
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Did you vote on them?
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J, yes, Ezel, maybe you can describe this because you set up this nice voting system and also consensus system.
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E.
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So I mentioned stages.
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We had approximately six, seven stages, and, and in each of them it contains a different consensus system.
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Let's say we first started with the suggesting of the concepts that we want to see in the second edition and we had a huge list right Like maybe 150 different concepts.
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Sorry, by word concept you mean a kind of a definition that's in the glossary, because you're using that Just a word.
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Yeah, a concept of a definition that's in the glossary because you're using that Just a word.
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Yeah, a concept is a word, and then it gets a definition in the glossary.
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So, yeah, okay, that's okay.
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I started from the beginning.
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Actually, that's fair, yeah.
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So everybody suggested we created a sort of like a website and it was like just type your concept and hit enter, that's it.
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And then we collected all these, we grouped them and then we sent to everyone every single router and said, like, vote on them, which one would you like to see more?
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And then we had basically a quantity of the weights of these concepts and then we saw, okay, like, for example, flow, flow rate, this had, I don't know, 50 volts Out of 65 routers.
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50 volts, it's amazing.
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Okay, we took all that.
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So we set a threshold.
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Above the threshold, we took all the concepts.
00:23:34.515 --> 00:23:41.757
Then we distributed all these concepts to these writing groups which we randomly selected.
00:23:41.757 --> 00:23:46.699
It wasn't that random because we want to book everyone from each discipline to these groups.
00:23:46.699 --> 00:23:49.488
So each group had three, four concepts.
00:23:49.488 --> 00:23:59.130
Let's say they wrote these concepts even though in that group, for example, they have a concept but they are not the expert on that concept.
00:23:59.130 --> 00:24:03.565
Still, we wanted them to write this and then they wrote it.
00:24:03.565 --> 00:24:20.807
We called these draft definition drafts and then we posted in a shared folder and we said to everyone okay, now it's time to review and you have unlimited rights, review anything that you want.
00:24:20.807 --> 00:24:25.886
Then our shared folder became a crazy, a monster.
00:24:25.886 --> 00:24:34.199
In the end it was really like maybe 10, 15 seconds you needed to wait to open the file.
00:24:34.199 --> 00:24:36.810
It was crazy, like it was really big.
00:24:36.810 --> 00:24:53.070
All these comments, all these reviews and in the end the reviews were actually cumulative reviews, so everybody was seeing the review of the person who did it previously and they were like cumulatively getting reviewed.
00:24:53.070 --> 00:24:57.532
And the last review we took it as the final definition.
00:24:58.634 --> 00:25:03.077
Okay, I also had a question about because it's called Glossary for Research.
00:25:03.077 --> 00:25:15.005
So was it immediately thought as a tool for researchers, scientists, or also engineers, practitioners, or that's a byproduct and you just focus on?
00:25:15.046 --> 00:25:16.987
researchers.
00:25:16.987 --> 00:25:26.813
I'm an engineer, so I see value of this kind of tool also for engineers because, at the end of the day, there are many concepts that are unclear.
00:25:26.813 --> 00:25:37.839
If you look, for instance, at our fire engineering field, there is still a lot of misconceptions and terms that are not clearly defined.
00:25:37.839 --> 00:25:48.491
But I think an important thing is that we wanted to give this kind of meaning of research, in a sense that we say, okay, this is not just a bunch of friends deciding on something, this is a bunch of scientists.
00:25:48.491 --> 00:25:50.438
Let's say that they're supposed to know what they're doing.
00:25:50.438 --> 00:25:58.763
So to give more credibility of it, I think to to have the keyword research has been important because, again, an engineer will probably cite something that comes from research.
00:25:58.884 --> 00:26:03.075
Sometimes researchers are more would probably cite something that comes from research.
00:26:03.075 --> 00:26:07.567
Sometimes researchers are more skeptical in citing something that comes from engineering.
00:26:07.567 --> 00:26:09.719
So in a way it's a.
00:26:09.719 --> 00:26:38.486
Again, we were writing a glossary, so words are very important, but it's a way to push for credibility, keeping in mind that not everyone was necessarily only a scientist, because we had also in the first edition, some people that were more from the practice world, for instance, of crowd dynamics, you know, people involved in crowd management, on crowd events and so on, but most people are actually scientists.
00:26:38.486 --> 00:26:43.507
I mean, if you look at the list, I think pretty much almost everyone has a PhD in there.
00:26:43.507 --> 00:27:04.789
So I think the word research is important because it sends this clear message that this is a tool developed by scientists and, of course, engineers will find this useful, especially in our world of fire safety engineering Because, again, we touched on a lot of topics for which still, if you go around and ask around, I'm pretty sure there is a lot of misconceptions.
00:27:06.297 --> 00:27:20.026
If you would narrow this discussion to concepts relevant to fire evacuation, were there many of those concepts that other groups of researchers in the room would completely differently understand than the fire researchers?
00:27:20.836 --> 00:27:28.482
Well, you know, statistically, if you have 60 plus authors, there would be one or two that disagree on something.
00:27:29.023 --> 00:27:29.665
Different opinion.
00:27:31.044 --> 00:27:39.881
And I mean there are some concepts which have been very much debated, I mean panic, crowd, crush, stampede, just to mention a few, even fundamental diagrams.
00:27:39.942 --> 00:27:57.332
You know, I was the one starting questioning some of the definition that we had of fundamental diagram, because there is this never-ending discussion into how fundamental should something be to be called fundamental, because we can find many fundamental diagrams if you look at children, adults, people with disabilities and so on.
00:28:02.634 --> 00:28:07.887
But I mean the nice feeling was, though, that everyone was with a positive attitude, so everyone had the mindset that we are doing something for the good of our community.
00:28:07.887 --> 00:28:23.839
I mean, there were no money involved in this, as I say, while for the first edition at least, we had the workshop paid, let's say, by this Lawrence Center, we had all the facility and all the venue paid, so it was also a nice excuse to meet with a couple of friends there, but this was all on a volunteer basis.
00:28:23.839 --> 00:28:30.861
So we, the whole effort was to try to build also a positive community sense.
00:28:30.861 --> 00:28:36.163
So we're doing something for free, we're doing something on a volunteer basis and we're doing this for the good of the whole community.
00:28:36.163 --> 00:28:43.166
So we never really experienced someone like having a negative attitude or like, let's say say, being stuck on a topic.
00:28:43.166 --> 00:28:49.104
Actually, even the conflicts that we had in terms of definition, there were very few and we were solved pretty smoothly.
00:28:50.277 --> 00:29:10.997
I don't recall, ezel, maybe you remember how many there were, but we talk about five, six terms that had not too many right, I mean originally we were thinking, we thought we are going to have many conflicts and we were thinking, okay, we need to arrange a meeting among all the organizers and in the end we had, like what you said, five, six, which we can actually solve them through mailing.
00:29:10.997 --> 00:29:12.403
We didn't even have to meet.
00:29:12.403 --> 00:29:13.941
It was really interesting.
00:29:14.295 --> 00:29:15.809
Perhaps the human crowd dynamics?
00:29:15.809 --> 00:29:18.361
Researchers are more civilized than the rest of us.
00:29:18.361 --> 00:29:19.986
Teach us.
00:29:20.895 --> 00:29:21.799
I would be interested.
00:29:21.799 --> 00:29:23.184
I mean to be honest with you.
00:29:23.184 --> 00:29:25.741
This is an exercise that every community should do.
00:29:25.741 --> 00:29:35.279
I would love to have a fire safety engineering glossary, but again there would be a challenge to have 65 plus people.
00:29:36.477 --> 00:29:49.949
Which is kind of interesting because you know, in fire you would have modelers, you would have experimentalists, you would have practitioners, you would have academics, each of them having perhaps a different view on even the simplest things like what constitutes a fire.
00:29:50.134 --> 00:29:59.564
Like that's a definition, you could battle for a while and I assume it could be as similar as constituting the definition for evacuation, definition for evacuation.
00:29:59.604 --> 00:30:18.785
But what you previously said about the definitions, that rather are, you know, not excluding anyone that you find a piece of yourself in the definition and you sacrifice perhaps some of the stuff you would like in a definition for it to be more broadly representative to others, and then again you can build on the definition.
00:30:18.785 --> 00:30:19.988
It's not that this is it.
00:30:19.988 --> 00:30:21.723
It's not that evacuation is only this one page in your glossary.
00:30:21.723 --> 00:30:22.248
It's not that this is it.
00:30:22.248 --> 00:30:24.518
It's not that evacuation is only this one page in your glossary, it's much more.
00:30:24.518 --> 00:30:37.839
But that's a common starting point and if you approach a crowd psychologist, someone who's modeling evacuation, a computer scientist or evacuation specialist, this is something that opens the doors.
00:30:37.839 --> 00:30:45.830
I guess we're capable of enhancing our FIRE definitions through the wisdom of the other groups as well.
00:30:45.830 --> 00:30:56.971
I wonder, like if you were going with the definition of, let's say, evacuation, like how much of that definition is what the FIRE people wrote and started with and how much did it evolve during the discussion?
00:30:57.516 --> 00:31:07.329
I have to say that's one of the least controversial definitions because at the end of the day we decided to split it in sub definitions which looked at different aspects of it.
00:31:07.329 --> 00:31:12.807
So you know, we looked at face evacuation, self evacuation, community evacuation, assist evacuation.
00:31:12.807 --> 00:31:39.827
So we kind of split it in sub parts and again, with this period of having everyone be able to recognize themselves into that definition, so maybe some parts of it will probably be more specific because, for instance, if we look at, one of the sub-definitions was controlled evacuation, which is probably something that you use a lot in crowd management and management of events, much less in a fire, for instance.
00:31:39.827 --> 00:31:46.888
But I mean you still have things like phased evacuation or assisted evacuation, which are very typical of a fire, for instance, but I mean you still have things like face evacuation or assist evacuation, which are very typical of a fire scenario.