Maria Pretorius BEng, MPhil, PGCert HE

Senior Lecturer

Maria Pretorius is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences. Her professional and research background is in methods used in computer science to simulate crowd behaviour e.g. Agent-Based Modelling, human behaviour modelling etc., in particular emergency and non-emergency behaviour in large crowd scenarios.

Responsibilities within the university

Module leader

  • Diploma in Industrial Studies
  • Web and Intranet Content Management
  • Work Placement Course - CMS

Module contribution

  • Human Computer Interaction and Design
  • User Experience Design
  • Software Tools for Academic Practice

Recognition

  • International Association for Fire Safety Science (Member)
  • Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (Member)

Research / Scholarly interests

  • Crowd behaviour.
  • Emergency and non-emergency behaviour in large crowd scenarios, particularly in external areas.
  • Methods used in computer science to simulate crowd behaviour e.g. Agent-Based Modelling, human behavior modeling etc.

Recent publications

Pretorius, M., Gwynne, S. and Galea, E. R., Large crowd modelling: an analysis of the Duisburg Love Parade disaster. Fire and Materials. DOI: 10.1002/fam.2214, 2013.

Pretorius, M., Gwynne, S. and Galea, E. R., The collection and analysis of data from a fatal large-scale crowd incident, Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium, Human Behaviour in Fire 2012, Cambridge UK, 19-21 September 2012, Interscience Communications Ltd. pp. 263-274. ISBN 978-0-9556548-8-6, 2012.

Pretorius, M. Ghassemian, M. and Ierotheou, C., "Virtualisation - securing a greener tomorrow with yesteryear's technology." Proceedings of the 12th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2011), May 2011.

Pretorius, M. Ghassemian, M. and Ierotheou, C., "An investigation into energy efficiency of data centre virtualisation." Proceedings of 3PGCIC-2010, Japan, November 2010.