Key details
Maria Pretorius
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.