Abstract
Current PTR-MS technology allows hundreds of volatile trace gases in air to be measured every second at extremely low levels (parts per trillion). These instruments are often used in atmospheric research on planes and ships and even in the Amazon rainforest. Recently, we have used this technology to examine air composition changes caused by large groups of people (10,000-30,000) under real world conditions at a football match and in a movie theater. In both cases the trace gas signatures measured in ambient air are shown to reflect crowd behavior. By applying advanced data mining techniques we have shown that groups of people reproducibly respond to certain emotional stimuli (e.g. suspense and comedy) by exhaling specific trace gases. Furthermore, we explore whether this information can be used to determine the age classification of films.
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@inproceedings{williams2019what,
title = {What can we learn from the air chemistry of crowds?},
author = {Jonathan Williams and Christof St\"{o}nner and Achim Edtbauer and Bettina Derstorff and Efstratios Bourtsoukidis and Thomas Kl\"{u}pfel and Nicolas Krauter and J\"{o}rg Wicker and Stefan Kramer},
editor = {Armin Hansel and J\"{u}rgen Dunkl},
url = {https://www.ionicon.com/sites/default/files/uploads/doc/Contributions_8th-PTR-MS-Conference-2019_web.pdf#page=122},
year = {2019},
date = {2019-05-10},
booktitle = {8th International Conference on Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometry and its Applications},
pages = {121-123},
publisher = {Innsbruck University Press},
address = {Innsbruck},
abstract = {Current PTR-MS technology allows hundreds of volatile trace gases in air to be measured every second at extremely low levels (parts per trillion). These instruments are often used in atmospheric research on planes and ships and even in the Amazon rainforest. Recently, we have used this technology to examine air composition changes caused by large groups of people (10,000-30,000) under real world conditions at a football match and in a movie theater. In both cases the trace gas signatures measured in ambient air are shown to reflect crowd behavior. By applying advanced data mining techniques we have shown that groups of people reproducibly respond to certain emotional stimuli (e.g. suspense and comedy) by exhaling specific trace gases. Furthermore, we explore whether this information can be used to determine the age classification of films.},
keywords = {atmospheric chemistry, breath analysis, cheminformatics, cinema data mining, data mining, emotional response analysis, machine learning, movie analysis, smell of fear, sof, time series},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}