Nearly two thousand years later, the rise of car traffic presents a different problem for those navigating streets on foot. Despite a plethora of crosswalk designs, crossing the street can still be a perilous endeavour.

For families under the California sun, beyond the gates of the happiest place on earth, the challenges are not about road safety, but about user experience. Here, long line-ups, crowded paths and vast spans of park present obstacles for families taking in the Disneyland experience – and their desire to return.

In the business of safety or the business of entertainment, gathering data about human behaviour used to be prohibitively time consuming and inaccurate. Today, the prevalence of surveillance video has largely solved the data gathering problem, but it has also created new ones: volume and velocity. Locked in the timecodes of millions of hours of video footage lies the answers to safer environments, and happier customers. But how do we unlock the data in motion and extract meaningful information — quickly and efficiently?

This is the conundrum that public and private sector industry across North America bring to Simon Fraser University professor Greg Mori. From a modest lab in the corner of the applied sciences building, Mori and his team are leading the field of computer vision and machine learning to improve human experiences, operations and decision-making through data. Empowered by new scales of real world video data and powerful computational approaches, his work is measuring aspects of human behaviour that used to be difficult to measure.