Designing The Connected Stadium 2.0

Whether you are watching your favorite team play from your home, at the sports bar or among 50,000 screaming fans at the stadium, each environment will give you a different experience. Researchers at the University of Glasgow are working on ways to connect those three different environments of fans and customize the use of technology within each setting.

"People watching at home don't feel part of the game, but have the advantage of being able to choose services such as viewing footage from different camera angles or even catching up on a different game," said project leader Matthew Chalmers. "We are exploring how to let people interact at a game, such as by sharing video clips, pictures, or even footage of their favorite goals using something like a Bluetooth network."

Chalmers and his team are partnering with Microsoft's Socio-Digital Systems research group in Cambridge and Arup, a global developer of sports venues including the Beijing National Stadium, to develop the "augmented stadium" which will combine the use of mobile technology with the fan experience.

To understand how spectators interact with the game, the researchers will first observe and record fans, looking for opportunities where technology could enhance the experience. Combining sociology of sport concepts with crowd interaction research, the team hopes to discover the patterns of communication that may be possible. Designing for "crowd-centric computing" includes not only the experience of each fan, but also the experience of the crowd as a whole. Fan to fan, fan to crowd and fan to team communications could all be enhanced with the right technology.

In addition to crowd interaction, the connection to friends not at the stadium is also part of the design.
"We are thinking of supporting the 'man down' scenario where a member of a social group can't make it to a big match," Chalmers told me in a recent interview. "He/she might be watching the same match at the pub or at home, or may just be unable to watch it at all... but in either case still wanting to keep in touch with the banter of his/her friends."

Cisco Systems has also made the connected stadium a goal for the future. They have combined their strength in networking with the type of social research that the Glasgow researchers are discovering to enhance the fan experience.  See their vision of the future in this History Channel - Modern Marvels video.

Applications like Major League Baseball's At Bat 2009, an iPhone/iPod app that will include in-game video and audio along with updated stats, scores and news, are the first step towards live interactive information.

Chalmers considers those applications as complementary to his research. "I see them as 'more of the same' in that they are examples of the traditional norm of 'official' content providers distributing their information their way. That's fine, and I'm glad if that information is made available in a mobile way," he said.  "The crowd interaction features are the difference."

In an interview with The Scotsman, Stuart Reeves, another researcher on the Glasgow team, explained: "The idea is to give some power back to sports fans, so they can share information and make their own record and analysis of matches and get more out of the experience. We will then use this information to design data-sharing applications which enable photo-sharing and blogging in real time, using Wi-Fi, GPS and 3G technology."

Of course, trying to connect thousands of mobile device users in a small geographic space, like a stadium, presents a technical challenge. While some of the team's prototype applications have relied on 3G or Wi-Fi technology, Chalmers is also considering the concept of mobile ad-hoc networks, or MANETs.

These networks rely on each wireless device to be a receiver and a router, so that a network can be instantly built between devices without the support of a central infrastructure. "This will allow fans to make use of their own commodity phones to have a kind of independent communication infrastructure to do their own thing on -- and avoid many of the problems of limited bandwidth provided locally and commercially," Chalmers said. "They can use that infrastructure in the stadium, but also have it with them outside of the event in the pub/street/wherever."

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Exercise Wins Again

It just seems too good to be true. Study after research study consistently promoting the endless benefits of exercise. Couch potatoes everywhere are waiting for the other shoe to drop, telling us that all of those scientists were wrong and we should remain as sedentary as possible.
Yet four additional studies released recently each give the same prescription for improving some aspect of your health: exercise.

They add to recent evidence that regular workouts can improve old brains, raise kids' academic performance and give a brain boost to everyone in between.

Better bones
One study illustrates the effect of exercise on preventing or limiting osteoporosis, which affects more than 200 million people worldwide. Researchers at the University of Missouri found that while both resistance training (lifting weights) and high impact exercise (running) both help build needed bone mineral density (BMD), running is the better choice.

"Exercise programs to increase bone strength should be designed using what is known about how bones respond to exercise," said Pam Hinton, associate professor and lead author. "Only the skeletal sites that experience increased stress from exercise will become stronger. High-impact, dynamic, multi-directional activities result in greater gains in bone strength."  The study was published in the February issue of the Journal of Strength Conditioning.

Less pain
In a related study, exercise seemed to be one of the few successful remedies for those that suffer from low-back pain. In the February issue of the Spine Journal, University of Washington physicians summarized 20 different clinical trials that promoted different solutions to alleviating pain.

"Strong and consistent evidence finds many popular prevention methods to fail while exercise has a significant impact, both in terms of preventing symptoms and reducing back pain-related work loss," said Dr. Stanley J. Bigos, professor emeritus of orthopaedic surgery and environmental health. "Passive interventions such as lumbar belts and shoe inserts do not appear to work."

Better eye health
Also, vigorous exercise has now been linked with significantly reduced onset of cataracts and age-related macular degeneration. In the study, detailed in Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, researchers reviewed the eye health of 41,000 runners over seven years and found that both men and women had significantly lower rates of these two diseases than the general public.

Men who logged more than 5.7 miles per day had a 35 percent lower risk than those that ran less than 1.4 miles per day. While the correlation is strong, the reason is not clear.

"We know some of the physiological benefits of exercise, and we know about the physiological background of these diseases, so we need to better understand where there's an overlap," said Paul Williams, an epidemiologist in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Life Sciences Division.

Cancer prevention
Each year in the U.S., more 100,000 people are diagnosed with colon cancer. To see what effect exercise has on lowering this rate, researchers at Washington University and Harvard University combined to review 52 studies over the last 25 years which linked exercise and the incidence of cancer. Overall, they found that those that exercised the most (5-6 hours of brisk walking per week) were 24 percent less likely to develop the disease than those that exercised the least (less than 30 minutes per week).

"The beneficial effect of exercise holds across all sorts of activities," said lead study author Kathleen Y. Wolin, Sc.D. of Washington University. "And it holds for both men and women. There is an ever-growing body of evidence that the behavior choices we make affect our cancer risk. Physical activity is at the top of the list of ways that you can reduce your risk of colon cancer."

So, are there any studies out there that link exercise with a negative outcome?

In a recent study published in the journal Obesity, Dolores Albarracín, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, did find that people who are shown posters with messages like "join a gym" or "take a walk" actually ate more after viewing these messages than those that saw messages like "make friends."

"Viewers of the exercise messages ate significantly more (than their peers, who viewed other types of messages)," Albarracín said. "They ate one-third more when exposed to the exercise ads."



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Soccer Robots Getting Smarter At RoboCup

Anyone who has ever bravely volunteered to coach a youth soccer team is familiar with the blank stares that ensue when trying to explain the offsides rule. The logic that combines moving players, the position of the ball and the timing of a pass is always a challenge for 10-year-old brains to grasp (let alone 40-year-old brains.) Imagine trying to teach this rule to an inanimate, soccer-playing robot, along with all of the other rules, movements and strategies of the game.

Now researchers have developed an automated method of robot training by observing and copying human behavior.

Why are scientists teaching robots to play soccer? The short-term motivation is to win the annual RoboCup competition, the "World Cup" of robotic development. International teams build real robots that go head to head with no human control during the game. This year's competition is in Graz, Austria in June.

Here's the final match from the 2008 RoboCup:



The long-term goal is to develop the underlying technologies to build more practical robots, including an offshoot called RoboCup Rescue that develops disaster search and rescue robotics.

In a study released in the March 2009 online edition of Expert Systems with Applications, titled "Programming Robosoccer agents by modeling human behavior", a team from Carlos III University of Madrid used a technique known as machine-learning to teach a software agent several low-level basic reactions to visual stimuli. "The objective of this research is to program a player, currently a virtual one, by observing the actions of a person playing in the simulated RoboCup league," said Ricardo Aler, lead author of the study.

In addition to actual robots, RoboCup also has a simulation software league that is more like a video game. In the study, human players were presented with simple game situations and were given a limited set of actions they could take. Their responses were recorded and used to program a "clone" agent with many if-then scenarios based on the human's behavior. By automating this learning process, the agent can build its own knowledge collection by observing many different game scenarios.

The team has seen early success at learning rudimentary actions like moving towards the ball and choosing when to shoot, but the goal is to advance to higher-level cognition, including the dreaded offsides rule. Implanting the physical robots with this knowledge set will give them a richer set of actions to choose from when they are exposed to visual stimuli from the playing field.

Previous attempts at machine learning relied on the robot/software to learn rules and reactions entirely on their own, similar to neural networks. Aler's team hopes to jump start the process by seeding the knowledge base with human players’ choices. While current video soccer games like FIFA 2009 already use a detailed simulation engine, transferring this to the physical world of robots is the key to future research.

RoboCup organizers are not shy about their ultimate tournament in the year 2050. According to their website, "By mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, comply with the official rules of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup."

That's right; they plan on the robots beating the current, human World Cup champions. "It's like what happened with the Deep Blue computer when it managed to beat Kasparov at chess in 1997," says Aler.

Maybe they can also build a robot linesman who can always get the offsides call correct!