Excellence Prize 2014 Awarded to Armel Ulrich Kemloh Wagoum

Each year, Forschungszentrum Jülich awards the Jülich Excellence Prize for outstanding PhD theses. In 2014, Armel Ulrich Kemloh Wagoum from JSC was one of two winners. He accepted the prize during the official event "JuDocs 2014 - Karriere made in Jülich" on 14 June 2014, when Forschungszentrum Jülich bid farewell to 45 PhD students.

Armel Ulrich Kemloh Wagoum worked on his PhD thesis at JSC in cooperation with the University of Wuppertal between 2009 and 2012. The main topic of his thesis entitled "Route Choice Modelling and Runtime Optimisation for Simulation of Building Evacuation" was crowd management using computer simulation on HPC systems. He developed route choice techniques for pedestrians based on perception of the local environment and achieved a faster-than-real-time evacuation simulation of a stadium using a hybrid parallelization. The thesis was part of the BMBF-funded project Hermes, one aim of which was the conception and development of a real-time evacuation assistant for mass events. Dr. Kemloh Wagoum is currently working at JSC in the department of Civil Security and Traffic, where he is involved in the development of the Jülich Pedestrian Simulator (JuPedSim), for which his thesis laid the foundation. JuPedSim is a free, open-source tool for performing evacuation simulations with state-of-the-art pedestrian models. The first version of JuPedSim is being showcased on board the "MS Wissenschaft" – an exhibition ship which is currently traveling through Germany – and shows an interactive computer simulation of the evacuation of the ship.
We congratulate Armel Ulrich Kemloh Wagoum on receiving the prize!

from JSC News No. 224, 15 July 2014