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Renowned Algerian Rai Singer Rachid Taha Passes Away

Rachid Taha. (AFP)
Rachid Taha. (AFP)
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Renowned Algerian Rai Singer Rachid Taha Passes Away

Rachid Taha. (AFP)
Rachid Taha. (AFP)

Renowned Algerian singer Rachid Taha passed away on Tuesday at the age of 59. He suffered a heart attack at his France residence.

“It is with regret and immense sadness that his son Lyes, his family and relatives, his friends and his record label Naïve, announce the death of artist Rachid Taha, following a heart attack overnight at his home in the Lilas [near Paris],” read the statement sent to AFP.

Taha was one of Algeria’s most famous Rai singers.

Born in Algeria, he immigrated with his family to France when he was ten years old.

He gained fame in France in 1980s, fronting the Carte de Sejour band with its unique blend of Western punk rock and Algerian Maghrebi music.

As a solo artist, Taha shot to international stardom with the remixed version of “Ya Rayah”.

He was preparing to launch a new album in 2019.

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Varieties

India Uses AI to Stop Stampedes at World's Biggest Gathering

As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP
As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP
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India Uses AI to Stop Stampedes at World's Biggest Gathering

As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP
As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP

Keen to improve India's abysmal crowd management record at large-scale religious events, organizers of the world's largest human gathering are using artificial intelligence to try to prevent stampedes.
Organizers predict up to 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing that began Monday and runs for six weeks.
Deadly crowd crushes are a notorious feature of Indian religious festivals, and the Kumbh Mela, with its unfathomable throngs of devotees, has a grim track record of stampedes.
"We want everyone to go back home happily after having fulfilled their spiritual duties," Amit Kumar, a senior police officer heading tech operations in the festival, told AFP.
"AI is helping us avoid reaching that critical mass in sensitive places."
More than 400 people died after being trampled or drowned at the Kumbh Mela on a single day of the festival in 1954, one of the largest tolls in a crowd-related disaster globally.
Another 36 people were crushed to death in 2013, the last time the festival was staged in the northern city of Prayagraj.
But this time, authorities say the technology they have deployed will help them gather accurate estimates of crowd sizes, allowing them to be better prepared for potential trouble.
Police say they have installed around 300 cameras at the festival site and on roads leading to the sprawling encampment, mounted on poles and a fleet of overhead drones.
Not far from the spiritual center of the festival at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, the network is overseen in a glass-panelled command and control room by a small army of police officers and technicians.
"We can look at the entire Kumbh Mela from here," said Kumar. "There are camera angles where we cannot even see complete bodies and we have to count using heads or torsos."
Kumar said the footage fed into an AI algorithm that gives its handlers an overall estimate of a crowd stretching for miles in every direction, cross-checked against data from railways and bus operators.
"We are using AI to track people flow, crowd density at various inlets, adding them up and then interpolating from there," he added.
The system sounds the alarm if sections of the crowd get so concentrated that they pose a safety threat.
'Makes us feel safe'
The Kumbh Mela is rooted in Hindu mythology, a battle between deities and demons for control of a pitcher containing the nectar of immortality.
Organizers say the scale of this year's festival is that of a temporary country -- with numbers expected to total around the combined populations of the United States and Canada.
Some six million devotees took a dip in the river on the first morning of the festival, according to official estimates.
With a congregation that size, Kumar said that some degree of crowd crush is inevitable.
"The personal bubble of an individual is quite big in the West," said Kumar, explaining how the critical threshold at which AI crowd control systems ring the alarm is higher than in other countries using similar crowd management systems.
"The standard there is three people per square foot," he added. "But we can afford to go several times higher than that."
Organizers have been eager to tout the technological advancements of this year's edition of the Kumbh Mela and their attendant benefits for visitors.
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, a devout Hindu monk whose government is responsible for organizing the festival, has described it as an event "at the confluence of faith and modernity".
"The fact that there are cameras and drones makes us feel safe," 28-year-old automotive engineer Harshit Joshi, one of the millions of visitors to arrive for the start of the festival, told AFP.