Fire Science Show
Fire Science Show
186 - Egressibility: a paradigm shift in evacuation research with Enrico Ronchi
If we truly want to account for the population at a disadvantage in evacuation, there is only this much we can do with the current approach... Pre-evacuation time distributions, walking speeds, and so on only tell us a part of the story - the story of your average person within an average population, with an average walking speed and average response. While these models are undoubtedly useful in engineering, there is perhaps a better way.
My friend and guest Enrico Ronchi is trying to find this way through his new ERC Consolidator grant, "Egressibility: a paradigm shift in evacuation research". In this grant, instead of following the main path, he is focusing on stuff we do not know - how to characterise disabilities and understand them better (also through the lens of health and medicine), how to quantify the disadvantages at large, and how to solve potential issues for those who those at the largest risk.
In this episode, you will learn about Enrico's ideas and the edge of the knowledge we have today. Some key points covered are:
• Insights on paradigm shifts in evacuation science
• Introduction of the concept of "egressibility"
• Importance of understanding functional limitations in emergencies
• Shift from agent-based models to inclusive data-driven models
• Use of technology, like VR, for immersive research experiences
• Need for changes in regulations for better evacuation safety
You may also like to read the paper by Guylène Proulx, which introduced egressibility as a concept - available here.
Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.
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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show. There is this buzzword, paradigm shift that a lot of people are using. I'm also using that word quite a lot and when I hear it it usually triggers me, and I know it triggers a lot of people. As someone who really enjoys Thomas Kuhn's philosophy and I've read the Scientific Revolution's book at least three to four times I'm very mindful about where I place such a big word. Paradigm shift means changing everything we know, changing the approach when your ordinary science does not work anymore, making such a shift that everything changes and suddenly you can accommodate that new paradigm that did not work with the previous science. And while it's a buzzword and it triggers me, sometimes you get to see science which is a true paradigm shift, which really has a true paradigm shifting potential, and that's the type of research we're talking about in this podcast episode. So ERC grants were given out in December Consolidator, two grants were given to topics around fire, which is astounding, like we've never had two grants given out to our field in the history. So that's amazing. And today I'm talking with one of those grantees, with my colleague, professor Enrico Ronchi from Lund University. You've heard Enrico on this podcast multiple times. He's been a guest since the start of the podcast and he's one of been a guest since the start of the podcast and he's one of the main figures in the world of evacuation science and human behavior in fires nowadays. And he just applied for a crazy grant that aims on paradigm shifting in the whole field of evacuation, with those at biggest disadvantage in mind. The grant is called Egressibility and Enrico is really trying to change the way how we understand the evacuation of the population at disadvantage disabled, elderly and figure out new ways to help them in buildings. That includes a lot of new research, a lot of new experiments, use of innovative tools and really flipping the perspective, like looking more on the disabilities themselves, looking more at human capabilities and linking those to the evacuation process. It's really interesting In this discussion, in this podcast episode, I've tried to pull Enrico about.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:What do we know today? So I want this episode also to be directly useful to you. So I'm really trying to find the edge of our knowledge today and where Enrico is trying to push that edge. So from the episode, you'll not just learn about the amazing project that Enrico just got, but you'll learn a lot about where we are today in modeling evacuation. So I know it's a nice journey, so stay till the end. At the end, enrico tells you the secret how he got the grant. That's hilarious. Anyway, let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Welcome to the fire science show. My name is Wojciech Wigrzyinsky and I will be your host Consultants, a multi-award-winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges. Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business has grown phenomenally to eight offices across the country, from Edinburgh to Bath. Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research, experience and diligence for effective, tailored solution. In 2025, there will be new opportunities to work with OFR. Ofr will grow its team once more and is keen to hear from industry professionals who would like to collaborate on FHIR safety features this year. Get in touch at ofrconsultantscom. Hello, I'm joined here today by Professor Enrico Ronchi from Lund University. Hello, enrico.
Enrico Ronchi:Hi Wojciech, Very nice to be back.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And what a great circumstance. Congratulations on your ERC Consolidator Grant.
Enrico Ronchi:Thanks, thanks, wojciech. I'm so happy to be here talking about this because, like you heard in the previous ERC episodes, it is so much work to get to this point.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I know, and let's say, the Fireside Show interview is the grand finale of it. It's just pure pleasure at this point after all those tears and work, but in fact it is. It is a massive achievement and it's a consolidated grant, so it's the middle tier for mid-career researchers. So that's even more competitive scheme than the starting grant. So especially amazing. And of course you're an evacuation scientist and your subject of research is tied to evacuation. The project is called egressibility, a paradigm shift in evacuation research. And let's start with egressibility. What the hell does egressibility mean?
Enrico Ronchi:Yes, I mean the idea is to merge the words of evacuation and accessibility. So the definition of egressibility is accessibility to means of evacuation, and this is an idea that I've been boiling down for quite some time. I had an earlier project here in Sweden, together with some colleagues from the medical faculty that are working more in the accessibility space, and we started talking about how can we characterize people with disabilities and different type of functional limitations so that we can get this information and make it useful for evacuation design. And then, you know, we went back into the literature and I came across this keyword from Ghislaine Proulx, that is, an historical researcher in the world of human behavior in fire, which, as you probably know, also passed away too early.
Enrico Ronchi:And then I say, okay, my only chance to get an ERC is to make a very clear case that I'm doing something completely new and addressing a very relevant problem. And that's why I thought, okay, we have aging populations and we know everything that is happening around us related to climate change at bigger scales, but also at BIMD, and everything that has to do with geopolitical uncertainty, security, everything that can trigger an evacuation. And then I said, okay, I'm going to bring the concept of evacuation to NERC through egressibility, so through looking at what are the vulnerable populations. So that's a bit the general idea of the project.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:So it would be something like not just what evacuation time you have or not what average walking speed person will take to go through an evacuation pathway, but more in how well this evacuation tool set can serve the population, including those that could be at disadvantage.
Enrico Ronchi:Yeah, I mean, the idea is to flip the coin. I mean, nowadays what we do is that we design buildings for the average person and then we do dedicated solutions for people that have different types of disabilities. Right, there has been a lot of discussion into using elevators for people with disabilities or, I don't know, different special types of alarms and things like this. But in order to flip the coin, we should start looking at a completely different population when we do experimental work or when we study case studies, which is a bit of the opposite of what is happening nowadays, because, you know, the biggest pool of people that we do experiments with nowadays is students, because that's the one that we have easier access to, and those are young, generally, mostly healthy, and this is completely on the opposite end of what are the most vulnerable population in a vacation.
Enrico Ronchi:So flipping the coin means looking at a completely different pool of populations to begin with, especially going into older populations, where we know that, you know, all of us, unfortunately, before or after in our life, we start having a decline in our functional abilities, which means that this literally affects everyone, and that's been my strongest argument for the ERC that this is a problem that really concerns everyone and you know, if we look at different emergency scenarios, fires especially, and if you look at the statistic of who dies in a fire, I mean it's pretty obvious that the great majority of those that suffer the most are the ones that have some sort of functional limitation very often. I mean even the cases that we read now in the news. I mean you heard really heartbreaking stories now from the LA wildfires, but I mean we heard this in Grenfell before with people with disabilities. I mean we hear it all the time that the most affected are always the most vulnerable.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah, I absolutely agree with that, and I also had an episode in the Fire Science Show with Marie Button where we talked about evacuation from a perspective of a disabled fire engineer so she's a wheelchair user and you didn't listen to that, dear listener. I would recommend that to open your mind to the problem. Anyway, I want to talk about the. I'm fascinated by people who get ERC grants. That used to be my dream. Perhaps it will be become a dream again. Anyway, going back to your grant, but it goes much further beyond just finding a new fundamental diagram just for old people, right? It's not about that, right?
Enrico Ronchi:No, it's not really about that. So it's, and it's not just because that's the other thing. When we think about people with disabilities, by default we kind of associate an image of a person in a wheelchair, but that's just one of the multiple you know possible functional limitations that you may have, the mobility ones. So the idea is to work more on characterizing what are, you know, all the abilities of people and how those can decline over time and what impact they have on evacuation. Because, again, I really learned a lot by working with people in the medical world and using all this classification that I use in the health science domain.
Enrico Ronchi:Especially the WHO has a very nice classification which is called ICF the International Classification of Functioning and Disability and Health, which basically makes a very clear categorizations on all the different abilities and functions that our body has and how those can be affected either by a disability or by our body decline with the age.
Enrico Ronchi:So basically, our often, with age, we have parts of our body that start declining in functioning, and that's the idea.
Enrico Ronchi:So to use this information from the health science to learn more about people and carry this information into the world of evacuation. So how we can use the information that we have in the characterization of the population to understand more of decisions, because you know, it's not black and white, it's not like I'm on a wheelchair or I'm not in a wheelchair. There is a lot of shades of gray on what kind of functional limitations you have and how they can affect your evocation. So the idea is to then link those with decision-making, so how you know if you have issues in balance when you walk down the stair because you have reached a certain age, how this affects your decision to even take a stair or to remain at home during a fire. So this is a bit of the idea. So to link decision making with a much more detailed characterization of your functional abilities, which will have to be borrowed by the health science domain. So I really need to look into that literature.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah, so that would also cover things like potential difference in, let's say, predistribution time, like you're talking about paradigm shift. So I assume at the end you're going to dump the pre-evacuation time paradigm and just replace it with something bigger, or I assume your thing is a bigger thing, but with the current engineering it would be. The response to the fire will be different when you are disabled. Uh, perhaps the preparedness even would be different, right?
Enrico Ronchi:I mean the ambition and I know this is very ambitious, and that's the whole point of the of the erc is to basically try to move towards a completely different types of models that are not like the classic agent-based type of models that we see nowadays used in evacuation simulations, but moving towards pure data-driven models, like pure machine learning-based.
Enrico Ronchi:And the way I call this is inclusive, because there is a lot into looking, looking at machine learning models, but nothing on inclusive machine learning. So how can we make sure that we don't have representation bias? Because, again, if you build a data driven model on a population of students, you're gonna spit out a result which is representing the decisions and behavior of students, but if you have a much wider population, you should be able to predict a much wider outcome. So that's the idea to move from classical agent-based models to data-driven, inclusive models which basically spit out some sort of a probability of taking a given decision based on the environmental conditions, all those classic factors that we look at in the evacuation models, along with a much more detailed characterization of your health, basically, or your functional abilities.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:So if you had to pick up the main parts on your pathway to get there, what do you need to do from day one, which starts soon, I guess to the last day of your grant? What's going to happen in between? How do you plan it out?
Enrico Ronchi:I think that there are two avenues here. The first one is to really learn more and more from the health science domain into how we can characterize people, because, you know, in engineering I would say, of course we are not medical doctors, so we need to use very simplified assumptions and so on, but in research we don't have to, you know, we can go back to fundamentals and we can talk. You know, I have a very nice pool of colleagues and collaborators here in the medical faculty at Lund University I work with on this topic and we can all learn in the fire engineering ward into a better characterization of people. And that's the first track, so to understand more on who each person that is involved in a vacation is. And the second avenue is to then design scenarios and design data collection methods that relate to decision making, in which we can understand what are the implications on your decision making of your functional abilities. And that's why I'm looking at a very diverse pool of research methods to use.
Enrico Ronchi:So from VR which you know I am a big enthusiast and a very big user for some years but also to talk to people, to do interviews and also review case studies Because, as I said, there has been a lot of events in which, very commonly, we can see that the most affected population are those with disabilities, are those with disabilities. So there is already a lot of real-world decisions that we can clearly see indicating that there are wide differences in decision-making process depending on what kind of functional limitations or disabilities you have. So that's the idea both designing a variety of data collection methods to understand more about decision-making depending on who you are, and a better characterization of who you are. So try to have a much deeper screening again, trying to learn from the health sciences, which is a challenge, because I mean me and many people that listen to your podcast. We are engineers, so we don't come from that board.
Enrico Ronchi:But I mean, no one prevents us to learn, you know, especially when we do research.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I'll ask you a difficult question, but perhaps it would be of great value to the listeners, who could use this information to process whatever they're doing at this time, not five years from here. So let's imagine if you would like to do exactly what you said, but with the state of knowledge that is today, like no further research, what would you say would be the bottlenecks or the edge of our understanding at the level of the population, the decision making and the general evacuation process? Let's start with the population, like where's the end of our knowledge today?
Enrico Ronchi:First of all, when we characterize samples, when we do experiments, for instance, with VR or whatever other type of data collection, the characterization of the sample that we do is very crude in engineering. So, okay, we have male or female, or you know, you have….
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Sometimes age right.
Enrico Ronchi:Age and things like this, but we don't have, like you know, the this classification that I mentioned goes down to the level of to which extent I'm open, I'm able to operate something, to which extent my limbs function, how my stamina is when I'm doing a given task. So it's much more level of depth into how our functional abilities in daily life and, in our case, will have to be translated to emergencies are working. So, first of all, we need to really learn into characterizing in much more depth the populations that we study.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:So you would need a much bigger granularity in the description of the data sets that you already work with. That's the struggle Exactly exactly the description of the data sets that you already work with.
Enrico Ronchi:That's a stop-bomb indeed, exactly because the data that we have are much more crude when it comes to describing people. I mean, yes, age, gender, a couple of other key variables, but that's pretty much it when it comes to health, while instead there is many more variables that are much more refined that can play a role.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah, Sorry I'm breaking your thought chain, but this is really interesting because you know, sometimes you would have those massive discrepancies in the walking speeds or something like, let's say, from one meter to two meters per second, like 100% distribution. And your data said there are people 20 to 60, right? So perhaps if you had granularity it would explain the differences. So, indeed, looking at the data with more knowledge of what came into that data can really open new pathways. But of course you have to repeat some studies because the ones that are today.
Enrico Ronchi:with just this data, it's not that you can magically increase the depth resolution of those right and you know, and there is also, of course that's one of the factors, because it's also not just about you know, your, because your physical ability describes this your so-called upper limit, let's say of what you could do.
Enrico Ronchi:But of course there is a lot about, uh, you know, decision making, motivation. I mean, we did, uh, several experiments over time. There are a few research studies that look like there are very vast differences in walking speed just because people have different motivations, right, I always recall I do an example of these experiments that were done here in Sweden in this project that with some colleagues we had on ascending evacuation and basically we could see that it was a very strenuous task to go upwards and we could see a boost in walking speeds towards the end of the task because people could see the end of the goal.
Enrico Ronchi:It's like when you run a marathon, you know the last lap is probably the one that you go fastest because you know it's done, you made it so. So there is like that side of the equation which is more like on motivation and the decision-making drivers, but on the other hand, we have very limited understanding on our upper limits of what we can actually do and also how aware we are of our upper limits and how this influence our decision-making and evacuation. Because you know, the bottom line is also some people may take a given decision simply because they're not confident enough with their abilities to take a given path or to to take a given, let's say, decision and how will affect down the line. There's likelihood of surviving a fire and you.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:You wanted to mention the second thing about population.
Enrico Ronchi:Yeah, yeah, the second thing, which is about you know what is the big hinder that we have today is the amount of data that we have.
Enrico Ronchi:So one thing that I want to do also is more to try to scale up the quantity of data that we can collect. And, you know, and this can be, that's why I'm aiming at different types of data collection methods vr, you know it allows you to collect quite large amount of data in a relatively shorter time, but also deploy this online. Because, you know, we worked in a project a couple of years ago with Ann Templeton and a few others were involved, john Drury and we started doing VR online and, you know, this kind of interactive behavioral intention experiment, so not just a crude questionnaire, but something that is kind of in between a classic questionnaire and a VR that you can deploy online. And there, you know, there are platforms that help you to collect data. And if you're able to design those in an inclusive way because that's the other challenge If you want to target the most varied group, you cannot.
Enrico Ronchi:You know, you open a Pandora's box linked to accessibility. You know I started thinking about audio games, all sorts of things that are not just classic visual stimuli, so, or all sorts of other triggers that you can have and scenarios that you can have to understand the decision-making and evacuation. But if you are able to decide this, then you can have and scenarios that you can have to understand the decision making and evacuation, but if you are able to decide this, then you can scale it up, because if you deploy things online, then you can collect thousands, tens of thousands of data and that really helps to have a much larger database.
Enrico Ronchi:And if you connect that with a good screening of who they're doing that that kind of test, then you can get a very good pool of data.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Like your rough estimation of how much data we have today and how much more you would need.
Enrico Ronchi:We talk about ideally, we will need from 10 to 100 times more data than we have today at least to start working with data-driven models, and you know I've seen this done, for instance, in the world of crowd dynamics. You know that I'm very close to the pedestrian and vacation dynamics community and, for instance, they start collecting this type of data at very large scale. You know million of trajectories from regular normal. You know walking not from emergencies, and you know for emergencies it's much harder to do this unless you do it in a controlled way, in an experimental setup, because these are rare events. You know we don't have an emergency every day, while instead, if you have to collect data from a train station, you can do it every day for a year.
Enrico Ronchi:That's what they did these colleagues in Eindhoven and University of Eindhoven. They basically collect trajectory of people for one year, every day, and they got a very large pool of trajectories and then they start understanding the patterns of movements. But, as I said, we can mirror this kind of modeling approaches which are data-driven, but for doing so we need a much larger pool of data. I mean, we need to talk about tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of data points to be able to build something that is robust enough, especially when you want to have a wide variety of representativeness in the population. You cannot just have the regular students.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:But it's good that there are already examples of scaling up this type of data accumulation and I think your idea of scaling up through also those gamified interfaces, virtual immense realities and all the tool sets that make this much easier than chasing people through a tunnel filled with smoke, like you was kind enough to do some years ago, it sounds much easier. Decision making when are we today with understanding the decision making process and how much you need to know more to turn aggressability into reality?
Enrico Ronchi:I think we have very good theories that help us understanding some of the fundamental concepts of human decision-making in fire emergencies.
Enrico Ronchi:What we need is to have a more refined understanding. So try to link more the data that we have to the type of people that we have, because these are general theories that will explain again what the great majority of people will do and, you know, give us overall patterns, are the ones that don't really necessarily behave according to the book, because maybe they are not able to take a staircase or because they cannot really easily get information and so on. So, and that's the thing, try to have a wider understanding on decision-making, not just for the average person, but even targeting specific groups. And again, there I my goal, and again this is also very ambition, but it's try to be systematic in characterizing populations that have different types of disabilities, for instance. So design experiments for someone that is visually impaired, or design an experiment for someone that has an hearing impairment, and so on, and target those groups and understand how their decision-making process works, because on this we know very little.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And because it has to be a part of a model, the decision-making process. Are you thinking more like Erika Kulgoski-style PADM-type models where there's a decision tree, or you're thinking more about just the distribution of outcomes and assigning probabilities? I don't know? Monte Carlo-ing the outcomes or another branch like machine learning and just having a blackboard?
Enrico Ronchi:This will have to be probabilistic but, I will basically work with machine learning model, because when you scale up data.
Enrico Ronchi:I think we can go that path to work with data-driven approaches, and the idea will be indeed to have on one side the characterization of the persons and on the other side the probability of taking a decision and trying to see if you can find good correlations. And again, the good thing with ERC which is good and bad in a way is that it gives you a lot of freedom. So I laid down a general description of the modeling approach that I want to take, thinking about this inclusive machine learning and thinking about, for instance, decision trees, the way they work with machine learning. They seem very well fit to work with evacuation decisions and I've seen some initial application in our world. But again, students, so you see, like people taking students and student data. Again, students, so you see, like people taking students and student data.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I've rushed to pretty complex concepts already. Perhaps I should step back and explain the listener. So when you try to model the behavior of people, you can just put a pre-evacuation time distribution on that on a group of agents, right, and just say, okay, on average it takes them from 30 seconds to five minutes to start evacuating. Whatever they're doing doesn't matter, it's a delay. You can use some decision tree and try to figure out okay, this person needs to identify a queue process, the queue reach a critical level of stress, then inform the person next to them and then start evacuating and assign some values to those to them and then start evacuating and assign some values to those. Or perhaps you can observe like 100,000 people and say 37% of population would do this, 15% would do that, and from that have some distribution of tasks. What you propose is even further, because you want to observe and then use neural networks or machine learning models in general to provide you that to do this decision making like a human would, which actually could be the way.
Enrico Ronchi:Like you know, the human brain is a machine learning interface, so perhaps this could actually be more natural than we think, to be honest and I mean and if we can boil down what kind of people we're dealing with and again, in a scenario, and especially knowing that certain type of buildings are particularly vulnerable or they host vulnerable populations and have that better characterization.
Enrico Ronchi:I don't know exactly who they are, the people involved in an evacuation, but for instance, there are certain setups when I have people that actually cannot even evacuate and those are the ones that die the most often in fires. So, flipping a bit the coin of R-set, A-set into you know, just looking at the tail of the R-set and of course there are, it's not that simple because there are all the crowd dynamics involved and so on. But if you look at the tail of the R set and more than the bulk and the first one that go out, basically you can really focus on that part of our evacuation curve and have a better understanding on those, Because those are the ones that drive the R set generally.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah, havod. Now I'm thinking, you know, from, from the building design. Where do I put the? Where do I put the end of that? Do I investigate 99 of the population, 99.9? Or do I investigate, you know, one to a million case. And the thing is, because it's a tale, it takes you incrementally more to solve for that person. I don't want to say problem, but you know you can solve for most of the population represented by your average agent by your ordinary means of escape, that and that will probably work. It just doesn't work for the tail of your distribution, the, the population that's at disadvantage. But you eventually go to to cases where which is kind of tragic that this is the source of this discrepancy in in the casualties of that population, where it's very, actually very tough to provide for this particular disability or this particular disadvantage. And realistically, in the build industry, I don't think we can really solve for all of them, really.
Enrico Ronchi:I mean I understand your concern because it becomes a matter of financial decision making when do you invest and where do you not but I think we are still at the stage in which we don't really even know where we draw that line on.
Enrico Ronchi:So I think the first mission I mean we're not going to be able to solve this for 100, you know universal design in a vacation we are not yet there. I mean we are more and more there for accessibility and even there people complain that it's not as good as it could be. But I at least trying to understand if we can push the tail or at least characterize what the tail looks like, because at the moment it feels like we don't even know. I mean, when you read the codes or you read, like you know, studies that look at the vacation, very often they talk about people with disabilities in general.
Enrico Ronchi:I mean this could be vastly different types of populations. It could be someone completely functional because they have created in their daily life a setup that make them functional. Or it could be someone that is completely dependent on someone else for daily activities. And again, it's not black or white. There is a lot of gray scale. So the simple thing of trying to understand those shades of gray, let's say, I think we need to understand where we are now, and the feeling is that where we are now is really much ignoring a big portion of that tail, not as small as we think.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah, I don't want to sound like I'm against it. I just know the reality of consultancy and the reality of designing buildings very well and I know that if you go way too far without having a very good reason for going that far, you know, without having a very explicit risk-based proof that this is actually necessary, then eventually you lose it all. Like if you go too far, you're going to be replaced by a different consultant who doesn't want anything and they're going to do the job and the building is going to be unsafe. And it's not about just, you know, waving a flag and saying we want the best. It's about really turning this idea into reality in the most buildings that we can. Then it's a success, right.
Enrico Ronchi:And that's why we need two things First of all, to look at solutions that already exist.
Enrico Ronchi:I mean classic case elevators, I mean now for accessibility.
Enrico Ronchi:We have a lot of solutions that rely on this solution, or like alarms Alarms is not that expensive to make, alarms that are more aiming at universal design. I mean there are many things that are, I would say, low-hanging fruits towards aiming at the more diverse population. But, on the other hand, it's regulatory, because if this doesn't become, you know, if you don't have a push from the regulatory side, as you said, they're going to find someone else that does it for cheaper, to get it approved, and that's one, I mean one of the good things of the EU that they really push. The feeling that I got is and also from the reviews and in general, also from the panel when I read the review that they really appreciate the idea that the project has a strong potential for lobbying towards having more, let's say, to striving towards equality and to strive towards change in regulations. Because, again, if you think about the accessibility world, what you are saying today, maybe 50, 70 years ago they were saying the same oh, we cannot put ramps everywhere in buildings.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:This is too expensive Today. They are right.
Enrico Ronchi:Oh yeah, and today they are oh, we cannot do this, it's too expensive, the building will not have. So I'm in the very early phase of this and I'm aware that at some point you will hit a wall because the current regulations are not made to accommodate fully universal design and aggressability for evacuation. But I mean somewhere we need to start. So at least the idea to have a large research project at the EU level that looks at this. I think it's a very good starting point because then you can start quantifying things. Okay, if I start saying you have X percent, you know down the line to have a risk-based approach, you have X percent more of people that will not be able to evacuate and you can quantify that, then you have a much stronger argument towards changing regulation. Then now we talk very much general. Okay, people with disabilities, they need more help and they need more solution. But you know we don't have really something to quantify the consequences. I mean to that extent.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I didn't find it in your proposal, but are you also going to quantify the fire site to some extent, Like I could put a question like how big a grossability feature of the building is sprinkler in it?
Enrico Ronchi:I have to be honest, that's not what I put in the application, mostly because, as you know, fire is not the only thing that I'm worried about.
Enrico Ronchi:I mean, it's probably because fire regulations what the drive of the evacuation design, and that's always been also. You know, when I was in the interview I was arguing. You know, I'm a fire, I'm in a fire safety engineering group and you may think, okay, this guy wants to design a vacation that is also used for whatever earthquakes and things like this. But you know, very often the ones that design a vacation is the fire engineers. So it's people like me or in my education, the education where I teach the design. So I think the, let's say, the A set side of the equation is not something that I will look at in this project, but the main focus would be on the R set side. But on the other hand, I think I will lay the grounds for making this kind of comparisons Because, again, if you can then have a counter argument that, okay, I am not accounting for this, this and that, but I could take care of this through, you know, on the ASET side of things, then you will be able to defend your design down the line.
Enrico Ronchi:But I think we are at a much earlier stage. We are not really ready to have a full, let's say, health science-based design for a vacation, because we simply, in fire engineering. We know very little about this. We are not medical doctors and no one really sat down and learned more from this kind of literature. It's like one of those things that if you think about it, it makes sense. Okay, why no one really go and looked into the accessibility world and the health science world to see how people are characterized when they do a vacation design? But no one really did it. So I think that's where we have a lot to learn to start the process. But again, wojciech, I understand your concern. I sit often and you know many of my students end up being fire engineers.
Enrico Ronchi:You talk with them and how do you use vacation models nowadays? And they tell you oh, you know, I do one simulation for the worst case scenario. And then I ask what is your worst case scenario? Oh, that's what the code is telling me to do, and that's we go back to square one. We need to have tools to inform codes down the line.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:That's why I appreciate the paradigm shift in the title of the project, because if you really aim for that, that's what we could really use in this field and discussion. You just said, Isidar, I had this argument today with the client just earlier this morning.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:It was ridiculous. Like, do you want me to design you a safe building or you want number A to be larger than number B? Because if you want me to mathematically prove that my ACID is 400 seconds, our ACID is 308, I can tune the model so it shows you the number, not changing a single thing in your building. It's not the point to have a number, it's, it's a point to understand the system. And anyway, let's go further. Tell me how you're gonna approach experiments, because I found it interesting. You've already teased the, the vr stuff, but perhaps you can give me a grand image. We need more data. How are you gonna get the data?
Enrico Ronchi:yes, I mean I have the idea to use several approaches because, you know, there is a lot to learn from different methods for data collection. One thing that I mentioned in my application is that I want to do a systematic review of a set of big case studies that we, you know, ground failures when it comes to evacuation and see how much information we can find about the population, and we know.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:You mean, like big fires, world Trade Centers?
Enrico Ronchi:World Trade Center Grenfell. I mean, unfortunately, we see I mean when you look at the official reports and also informal, let's say, type of information that very often there is a significant part of the population that has some sort of functional limitation or disability. So to try to map out this, because this would be really helpful in understanding what kind of people you know, looking at the ones that have suffered the most, are the ones that then are most affected.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Sorry, is it constrained to a building or is it more like a community as well?
Enrico Ronchi:I will mostly focus on buildings because, again, there is a lot of discussion about this. I discussed this openly also with the ERC panel and the reason is impact, because on buildings you can actually have much easier time with codes and regulations If you want down the line trying to enforce something. When you go at community scale it gets much harder.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:But the framework is scalable. Let's move forward to how you're going to solve it.
Enrico Ronchi:yeah, and then you know, I will start doing interviews and again I want to really talk with people that have different types of disabilities and functional limitations and understand how they will face such a situation. Talk with them how it is, because, as I said, we started I did a pilot like this in Sweden, this project that I had a couple of years ago, in which we started talking with people with different types of disabilities, and you discover a lot of things that are not immediate to you as a fire engineer because you don't experience yourself that type of disability. So there are people that will openly tell you, as it is today the building which I'm in I will not even try to evacuate because I won't even be able to reach what I'm supposed to reach or other people that will tell you I have such good experience of moving around, despite I'm dealing with the disabilities, that I have a whole setup for myself to make this work if something like this happens.
Enrico Ronchi:So there is a lot of variety of possible responses, but there is a lot of unknowns as well Because, as I said, there are disabilities where are very little investigated. One thing in which we know very little, for instance, is cognitive disabilities that come especially with age, and there my idea is to not because you cannot get informed consent from people that have cognitive disabilities, but I want to talk with caregivers, so the people that are used to work or take care of people that have cognitive disabilities, and understand from them to which extent people are independent and to which extent what kind of task, depending on their experience, people can do during a possible emergency. So there will be a part on qualitative data collection and then I will jump into the quantitative stuff and then, as mentioned, I will deploy online vignette experiments, which is a bit what I discussed before. Its before like to having some sort of a hypothetical evacuation scenarios, and then you can you know we try to do this in loan, with different levels of immersion, so it will never be like when you are in the lab doing VR, but you can have designs that are not just filling in a questionnaire, so that you can have because you know the problem of questionnaires that people will ask you what would you do, but there are a lot of limitations in terms of validity.
Enrico Ronchi:If I ask you, what would you do? But there are a lot of limitations in terms of validity. If I ask you, what would you do and you don't have any sort of commitment to the consequences of what you say you will do, and that's where you know. We started looking at here and how we can increase validity in the data when you do this type of vignette experiments. And then VR, because with VR we can do multisensory experiences and especially when it comes to people with disabilities. Nowadays there is a lot you can do audio games, you can have a visual stimuli. I just met this morning with daniel nielsen from university of canterbury and we talk about this smell simulator. You know they they have a smoke simulator yeah, I, I've smelled that.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:It's really smells like smoke. It was ridiculous.
Enrico Ronchi:So I mean or different type of haptic stimuli, and also link this with physiological measurements.
Enrico Ronchi:So try to see how your body responds to these stimuli, and especially with people with disabilities.
Enrico Ronchi:I've been really fascinated by this concept that I read about in the world of psychology, which is called synesthesia, so how you trick your brain into thinking you are getting a given sensory stimuli where you're getting something else, so like.
Enrico Ronchi:The idea is that if you are blind, can you see an emergency sign because you're hearing an alarm, or if you're deaf, can you hear an alarm because you're seeing flashing lights or things like this. And in VR you can have very systematic experiments in which you have this kind of stimuli and you can measure what is your physiological response. And this has the potential to be groundbreaking, because then you can see how you can actually help, especially with older people that had that kind of sensory information before, that it's declining for them over time. So how can I trigger a better response to an evacuation alarm, for instance? Are there ways to? By using other sensory stimuli, and I know that this is like very lab stage and very, let's say, fundamental basic research at this stage, but I mean that has really a good potential down the line, because to my knowledge, no one did this kind of experiment.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:There were those shaking beds for deaf people.
Enrico Ronchi:I think, yeah, but not in VR, not in VR and not with like, while you are measuring your body.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:So, again, this is again a gap in data that we have and that you have to create to feed your paradigm shift. Very, very nice 45 minutes Snap. I wanted to talk inclusive machine learning, but I think no. I think I'll just congratulate on getting the ERC and now tell me how the hell you got it, because there's a bunch of students listening and a bunch of people who would love to sit where you are now as an ERC grantee, and for each of people who get this prestigious grant, it's been a journey. So I would love to ask you about your journey to ERC, to celebrate this as an accomplishment already and what you're going to get in five years. I'm going to interview you in five years and we're going to see about that. Tell me how you got to this place.
Enrico Ronchi:Maybe I will tell you. Oh, I was too ambitious. I had to go back to the real world.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Which actually is fine for ERC. That's the beauty of those grants. If you said that in five years, that's an information. That's an information.
Enrico Ronchi:I think that's what they really like in these projects is that you have a vision and, even if it's a very ambitious vision, that you try to push the boundaries of your field and I mean in my experience, I mean with Consolidator Grant about two years ago I started thinking about this Okay, should I give it a shot? I had tried the starting grant, like when I was very young in my career. I mean, it was probably.
Enrico Ronchi:When you were starting, yeah, when I was starting and you know you don't even get to an interview and I was feeling a bit like down. I would think, oh, I will never have a chance. This is so competitive. You know the percentage of success rate is so low. But then you know, over the years you start growing confidence. And then I chat with people that have got this grant. I had a chat with Guillermo and we started discussing OK, should I give it a shot? And he was giving very encouraging word that he could give it a try. You have nothing to lose. Of course you have to invest a lot of time in this, but if you don't even go to the interview, generally it's much less stressful. I mean, you, you just okay, it's a.
Enrico Ronchi:As all researchers, we all get a lot of rejections. I mean, we're not gonna sell the story. They were always successful. You know we all get a lot of rejection. But there I started working because I had this project in Sweden on aggressability. There was like a pilot of what I wanted to do and I learned a lot about from the colleagues in the medical faculty, about you know what we don't know, and I started thinking more and more about the idea that I thought this could actually fly at the EU level because the topic is relevant.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:It's the right time because you know of all the big events that we see around us linked to evacuations the scale also sounds like something you could not do with a normal grant, and you cannot really go much bigger than that. No, no, I, I, so it's I had no hope to.
Enrico Ronchi:I mean, the type of data collection I want to do. I mean, I have no hope to do it with a regular national grant, which you know they are up to 500k, 500,000 euros, something like this that you cannot do this huge data collection. You need a team, you need people with different expertise, you need people full-time designing experiments. So you know it's very ambitious. And then, you know, I started writing, I polished the idea, I got a few people to review it people that I knew got, got this. I had a very nice colleague from the transport group here at lund university, got the starting grant and now we have the lab together, right next to each other, and he was giving me encouraging words and we said, okay, I'm gonna give it a shot. I wrote the application and then last spring I got to know oh, you get invited for an interview on the first shot. So I was like, wow, and now we can talk.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:So I've reached the point where Guillermo told me it's going to be stressful. Yes, how good is that?
Enrico Ronchi:And there you know, my life changed, my daily life.
Enrico Ronchi:I invested a huge amount of time to be as prepared. I didn't want to have any regret if this will not go through. I thought, okay, I will get it. I will not get it, it doesn't matter. But I don't want to have a regret that I didn't try my best. So you know I spent so much time doing the homework that you know all ERC grantees tell you to do so. You know I spoke with people that got it in our field. I spoke with Guillermo. I spoke with Ruben Francesco Restuccia. I spoke with colleagues from other fields that I knew from Lund University that got it. I started because you don't know the panel, you don't know who will interview you.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Sorry, what was your panel? It was not eight it was social science.
Enrico Ronchi:That's the other thing. I strategically chose the panel that could possibly be most interesting in the topic because there is a panel on human mobility in ERC, yeah, which I felt okay evacuation, human mobility, it's fairly linked, but it's social science. So I also went into, let's say, as an engineer, to go in a social science panel. It's also a risk because you might get people say, oh, an engineer that wants to explain social scientists how to do social science research. It's. It's big risk because you know there is people with the entire career dedicated, for instance, to qualitative research, to doing interviews, and so I say doing everything to strengthen my profile, having publications in the world closer to the panel, reading up not only the previous panels because those are possibly part of the panels they will interview, but everyone that got the grant in my panel. I've read what was the grant about. I studied their profiles so I really had a long list of about. I had an Excel master sheet with I don't know a hundred names of people that possibly could be in my panel, because they say it could be people from previous panels, people that got the grant or any scientists in related fields.
Enrico Ronchi:Wojciech, I guessed every single person that interviewed me. I guessed pure by this study. So this is the biggest product I take. I studied so much who could be that I guessed every, and I watched YouTube videos how they talked the way, their accent, if there was like an accent that you could not be familiar with. What was their core research? Of course you know, with 100 plus people you need to do it systematically. So I did a number of people per day and you know, when I got in the reviews I saw the that's an overkill.
Enrico Ronchi:I saw the image of the faces and I recognized the faces and I knew each of them. What was their, their research, and I had a long list of questions. I guess all but one the questions they will ask me. So one was coming out of nowhere so and it was someone very tedious into agent-based model why you're not doing agent-based modeling. Agent-based modeling is better for this. So I probably you know they are bad cop, good cop type of setup yeah and someone was drilling me on this.
Enrico Ronchi:But you know, you know I teach this stuff and I, you know evacuation is my field, so I could really try to defend myself. But I felt like now I did everything that I could possibly do. Then, if it, because you know it's so competitive that you might get. You know, in my, in my panel, I think we were 10 or 11 people that got it something like this. So you might get number 12 or 13 out of whatever number they apply, and not getting it and you're still being very good. So I say, you know, I go with a clean conscience that I did everything that I could possibly do. But then I have also this funny anecdote that they told me from the panel that's what I saw. Okay, this is meant to be because the day that I did. Okay, this is meant to be Because the day that I did the interview. This is all online right there. So they sit in Brussels and you have a camera of their room in Brussels.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:It's online, okay, yeah.
Enrico Ronchi:So they are in Brussels and you sit in front of the computer and they made me wait a lot more than the allocated time. They say, just wait on this blank screen with the ERC logo, it can be some technical issue. So I said okay, maybe they have some technical issue in Brussels. And then when they come in they say, oh, sorry to make you wait, but we just had an evacuation alarm sounding in the building. So I said what I said, okay, and they started laughing. Oh, this is probably relevant to your topic. I said what yes it is. So I said what yes it is. So I said okay, since you are competing with so many people and you need to make yourself they have to remember about your project, I said okay, they're going to remember about my project at least.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah to the listener who just had an idea to set the fire to the. European Commission building. When you're on the interview for ERC, perhaps don't do this, but wow, what a coincidence. Nice, that's like a destiny.
Enrico Ronchi:I thought, okay, that's meant to be.
Enrico Ronchi:But you know, you put so much work and you know in your life you don't have only this, of course, because you know, you know this in the spring and then the interview was end of September, so I had a few months to prepare. You know it was summer, my child was born, so I also took parental leave. I wanted to spend time with the family. So you know, when the kids are asleep you go and you keep studying and I had my goals per day of people that I wanted to study or questions that I wanted to prepare, so I had to keep this.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:How much did you have to prepare for the interview? Was it like three, four months?
Enrico Ronchi:Yeah, something like this. It was from May no, end of April. May to September end of September.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I also learned from a lot of those interviews with colleagues who are doing ERC that it also gave them massive clarity of mind, that it really lets them reconsider a global image of the research field. If you were in a situation where you would not have gotten it, would you still say it was worth the hassle?
Enrico Ronchi:I think this was very useful for me also to start reading, because you know, when you have a panel of generalists, you start reading things that are not necessarily close to your field. I mean, they are related to your field but not close to your field. So the amount of reading that I did to fields that are not strictly mine, so to papers that I will not read otherwise, it's useful anyway. So because, for instance, I start reading about synesthesia and how to do psychological experiments with multisensory stimuli, how they do it in psychology. I mean this stuff was extremely fun to read first of all, but also very useful because you can actually take your ERC. You won't be able to have this kind of scale of a project without that amount of money, but maybe you can take one part of those ideas, break it down into a smaller project and try to run little bit. That's what I would have probably done if the ERC would have not happened. I would have probably taken some parts that are more feasible with less money and break them down and not throw away the whole work, because you know you put so much effort into reading, studying, framing the ideas, reviewing, reading, reading.
Enrico Ronchi:Because you try to read, people can ask you. You know, it's like going to a mega PhD exam in which they could ask you anything about the project, but about your field it's not. You are defending that, your field, not just your project. So they will ask you. Okay, I had questions on design very similar to what you were questioning. Okay, but how are you going to lobby for changes in design if you are?
Enrico Ronchi:still at an early stage. So you start questioning all your field and all your, let's say, things that are inside your bubble. They seem like things for granted, while instead they are things that you can question, and that's very useful for you because you start looking at the big picture. I think it's useful in general for you to become a better scientist and also to have a higher chance to publish in journalist journals, you know, not just in our field of fire safety.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Fantastic, and that's what I wish you to have a really impactful first outdoor paper nature cover.
Enrico Ronchi:That's a long shot. That's a long shot.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:That's the next time I invite you to the podcast.
Enrico Ronchi:Okay, so maybe in another life.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:You're very welcome here regardless. But you know, after this interview it was not a big surprise when I learned that when you got ERC, it overfilled me with joy to see you on the list of the grantees, and there was another FIRE project in the same ERC.
Enrico Ronchi:I spoke with the other grantee. We had a chat. We said that we want to talk together.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I was like oh my God, are we mainstream now to fire ERC projects in one call? This is insane. It never happened in history. So I'm so happy. But after this interview, it's just wow, blown away. I understand why you got it and I really, really hope that you will make aggressability happen and your commitment is there. It was somewhere in here. Yes, it's not merely an academic pursuit, it's a commitment to fair and equal society, so I'll be holding you for these words. Any final things to say?
Enrico Ronchi:First of all, wojciech, thanks for all the kind words, and I mean just a piece of advice to everyone that wants to try for an ERC it is not impossible. It is not impossible. And if you are a good scientist, if you have a good idea also, I mean it takes time. So the only thing that you need to be really prepared of is to have mental resilience and time investment, because these are the main things. You need to be ready to allocate time and energy mental energy in particular to an ERC, especially when you're at the stage of the interview, because to put together a large application I mean we have done many of those for large EU projects or large projects you know, from NSF or whatever your place in the world.
Enrico Ronchi:So this is not new to scientists but it's the cognitive load of doing interviews for a grant which is very stressful. So you need to be prepared for that. But don't be scared of that, because at the end of the day, you know your field, not someone else. These are generalists they will interview, so you will have a huge advantage against them of knowing your field. And the second final thought, wojciech, is that I really think this is an important topic. I mean I cannot be happier about the topic because you know this doesn't have just an impact on science and on our field, but it has an impact on society to try to change the mindset, to try to down the line, to be more engaged in code revisions you know I've been doing this kind of efforts with ISO and you know I've been an advisor for different codes fire safety codes around the world. But to bring that topic with the ground of science it's a completely different story and that's the big mission, ambitious mission of this project.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Fantastic. And when I read your grant, I've expected you're going to do new functional diagrams. You know you're going to investigate larger populations. That was kind of obvious. But it was surprising that you took a completely different pathway. And then I thought, yeah, perhaps that's exactly what we need. Like we have so much happening in this main branch of the science, perhaps we need something crazy, perhaps we need something much more different. And even if you don't succeed, even if your solution is not the ultimate solution, the pathway to get there is probably going to change the mainstream as well. So I think that's the thing with those ERC grants high risk, high gain. But even if it doesn't work out, because it's a massive undertaking, all the stuff that you're going to do to get where you want to get is going to change the industry. Looking forward to that. Cheers Enrico.
Enrico Ronchi:Thanks Wojciech, Thanks again.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And that's it. You'd not believe how happy it makes me to hear my colleagues succeed in such an extremely competitive schemes as ERC, especially at the Consolidator stage. Really awesome work, enrico, and I'm really, really happy that you're a representative of our community and it's really great to have our community represented at this level. And for the grant itself, the main thing is it's not an agent model. It's not a set R set model. It's not going to work like anything we use in engineering today. It's going to look at completely different aspects of evacuation. It's going to find the tail of R set. It's going to work like anything we use in engineering today. It's going to look at completely different aspects of evacuation. It's going to find the tail of R-set. It's going to look at those at biggest disadvantage and try to understand why they are at the disadvantage, and I think it makes it awesome. It is a completely new approach and I'm really curious about what comes out of this.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:This grant, the grant of Ruben van Coyle, which you've heard about, the grant of Francesco Restuccia, which you've recently heard about in the Fire Science Show those three are really impactful, practical things that are being developed today with a really good chance to change the status quo of fire engineering. So I'm absolutely thrilled to learn about the consequences. And also, if you're a young scholar and you would like a chance in your career to participate in research like that, being a participant, a postdoc, phd student at an ERC level grant is an outstanding opportunity for any young scholar. So I would highly recommend to follow those people Enrico, ruben and Francesco. They will have a lot of job openings because for those grants you need a lot of people and it's a great career path. So I would highly highly recommend looking for a position within those ERC grants. It's going to change your career forever, trust me.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Anyway, this is it on the fire science show today. I hope I've satisfied your hunger for high level, high quality fire science. This is the highest quality. You cannot get higher than this. Perhaps if someone gets a noble prize in fire engineering, that's going to be a higher level, but at this point, this is what we got. This is the top fire science and I'm bringing to you every week, and next wednesday will not be different. So see you then. Cheers, bye.