MAILab's CEO Dr. Phil Yang to Organize a Workshop "Itaewon Disaster, Why It Happened, How We Prevent Another Itaewon"

Having only ten days for organizing a team of world-best crowd-study experts who had sympathy with the victims of the Itaewon Disaster and shared the vision of future prevention, MAILab's CEO Dr. Phil Yang invited world's best experts in crowd safety to an online workshop which was held at 8:00 in Tokyo and Seoul, November 29 (Tuesday), 18:00 in Philadelphia, Nov. 28 (Monday), 23:00 in London, Nov.28 (Monday). Just a month after the disaster, the online workshop lasted up to 2 hours. Then, it will be followed by the January 29 to February 2 (4nights/5days) field trip to Itaewon, Seoul, and offline workshop/internal conference in Korea. Below is the background and the progress of the workshop in detail.

Now we feel the moral responsibility or obligation of the “remnants” who have witnessed the outbreak of the Itaewon Disaster; as globally-well recognized experts of crowd safety, all the participants in the workshop share such feelings and try together to make contribution to the prevention of another Itaewon disaster. As in the case of the Itaewon, which saw the causalities of 26 people from other countries, the fatalities from crowd crush will not stop in the national boundary of a certain country but rather rapidly increase due to globalization and urbanization. In this context, crowd crush is a global issue rather than a domestic one; thus, a group of international experts now get together for the online and field-trip workshops regarding the Itaewon Disaster.

The participants of our workshop are as below:

- G. Keith Still, a crowd safety expert and visiting professor of crowd science at the University of Suffolk in England
- Norman Badler, Professor of Computer and Information Science Dept., University of Pennsylvania
- Katsuhiro Nishinari, Professor, School of Engineering, University of Tokyo, Japan.
- Soon Joo Wang, MD, PhD Professor of Emergency Medicine, Medical School of Hallym University, Korea
- Phil Seung Yang (Organizer/Moderator), Ph D. CEO of MAILab, Seoul, in Korea

The main reason for the above selection is a diversity of expertise and origin.
Still is a site-oriented expert from England; Badler, computer graphic expert from US; Nishinari, mathematical physics scientist from Japan; and Wang, MD and Ph.D from Korea.