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Sports(a subtopic of Applications)
Human-Free Kick At Robocup 2002 - humanoids battle it out in soccer. By Dennis Normile. Scientific American Explore (September 23, 2002). "'The goal of RoboCup is to develop a team of robots that can beat the human World Cup champions by 2050,' says Hiroaki Kitano, a Sony artificial-intelligence specialist who is also president of the RoboCup Federation." 2005 Everest Expedition: Use of I-X/IM-PACs for Extreme Expedition Support - scaling the world's highest points with Rob Milne. Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh. "Rob Milne aims to climb Everest this spring - and it would also complete his round of the continent tops. His interest in AI technology gives us an opportunity to develop an application of the I-X tools and ideas to expedition support - this is the purpose of the I-Ex project. This page will detail the progress of this project - and of Rob himself! Rob leaves Edinburgh for Kathmandu on 3 April 2005, and aims to reach the summit of Everest in late May." 
Robots invade the table football pitch. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist Magazine (September 4, 2004; appears on page 18 with the title: Play table football against a robot). "Fans of table football, or foosball, will no longer have to hang around at the pub waiting for a friend to turn up before they can play. A robotic foosball table will be able to give them just as good a game. ... To allow the control system to track the ball, the base of the table is made of translucent glass, tinted green. A camera underneath photographs the ball 50 times per second, and sends this data to a built-in computer that maps the ball's position. Intelligent software then works out the effect of one of the figures kicking the ball. ... [Bernhard Nebel's University of Freiburg] team is now working on being able to stop the ball and pass it -- a capability that will be essential if the robot is ever going to beat good players."
Football injuries are rocket science. By Karl Flinders. Vnunet (October 14, 2002). "Clubs could save millions by using software to predict injuries: High-spending football clubs are set to save millions on injury-prone players with biomedical software from Computer Associates (CA), if a successful trial at Serie A giant AC Milan is taken up by other clubs. The software collects data during workouts over a period of time, which it then translates into predictions on how likely players are to pick up injuries. ... CA is using its CleverPath predictive analysis technology, which performs neural analysis and uses artificial intelligence to transform vast amounts of numeric medical statistics into meaningful predictions. ... CA is claiming an accuracy rate of over 70 per cent for the technology. "The club gave us unseen test data from the previous season to see if we would predict the injuries that had already happened and our success rate was in the high 70s." Play Ball! How Sports Will Change in the 21st Century. By Robin Gunston. The Futurist (January / February 2005; Vol. 38, Issue 7). "High-technology equipment. We may see completely new forms of artificial-intelligence-based machinery taking over areas of human activity within the next 20 years. Sports are no exception to this trend."  American (March 2005). "Camel racing, a favorite pastime in the Middle East, has taken flack from human rights advocates for the young boys imported to jockey the humpbacked desert beasts. Accordingly, the government of Qatar announced right before year's end that it was banning child jockeys. Their replacements? Why, robots, of course. ... But exactly how they work is being kept secret for now. 'They won't let me near the robot,' says Chuck Thorpe, a member of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University's Qatar campus."
 Software aids future tennis stars. BBC News (July 7, 2004). "As Britons bemoan another year without a Wimbledon hero, there could be some hope in a computer model being worked on at Kingston University in London. ... It will create a computer-generated competitor which rival players can pit themselves against. The system will analyse video footage of champions and allow other players to explore tactics to beat them. ... The research will focus initially on tennis but will move on to look at more complex sports such as football and basketball. 'As well as helping specialised sports training, the technology we are developing could have benefits in fields such as realistic computer gaming, virtual reality and surveillance,' said Dr Ahmed Shihab of the School of Computing and Information Systems at Kingston University."
Tennis machine keeps it 'real.' By Jamie Cwalinski. redandblack.com (April 13, 2005). "Even though they play in the strongest conference in collegiate tennis, the most challenging and intimidating competition the Lady Bulldogs may face might not even be human. Opposing them will be Boomer, the first ever robotic tennis machine capable of not only firing balls for a variety of drills but playing through an entire match. Georgia is the first college in the nation, and one of only six institutions nationwide, to use Boomer." Hawk-Eye keeps watch at Wimbledon. By Sarah Holt. BBC Sport (June 30, 2004). "The answer is Hawk-Eye - a sophisticated, virtual reality system that can tell whether a ball is in or out, as well as analyse a player's match strategy. BBC Sport asked founder Paul Hawkins, who introduced his invention to the Wimbledon commentary team in 2002, to explain how it works. ... 'There are five high-speed cameras high up in the roofs of Centre Court and Court One which accurately track the ball as it flies through the air,' says Hawkins. 'A computer captures the image from each camera and works out where the ball is. ..."
Software gambler takes on the tipsters. By Paul Marks. New Scientist (December 11, 2002). "Alan McCabe, an IT researcher at James Cook University in northern Queensland, has developed a software-based results tipster for Australian Rugby League - although it could just as easily be adapted for soccer, baseball or cricket. The program outperforms the best human tipsters. McCabe unveiled his Artificially Intelligent Tipster - MAIT for short - at AI 02, an artificial intelligence conference in Canberra last week. The project is a spin-off from research into handwriting recognition. ... Across the season, MAIT is outperforming human tipsters and getting its predictions right more than 66 per cent of the time." Data mining to beat the spread. Software review by Michael Hurd. Wired (Issue 10.01; January 2002). "The difference between winning and losing that Super Bowl bet can come down to one shred of numerical insight. To give gamblers an edge, statistics professor, author, and oddsmaking guru Michael Orkin has written a piece of pro football handicapping software that's a stat lover's dream. Optimizer8 mines data for patterns in NFL games.... Orkin's company, Snoop Data, just released a similar program for pro basketball for the 2001-02 NBA season. And Orkin is looking beyond sports: He hopes to turn the Optimizer's data mining success toward other data sets, like customer buying patterns, or assisting public health agencies in identifying patterns in the spread of diseases." They Weren't Meant to Be Games. By Brad King. Wired News (September 2, 2002). "Design teams also continue to develop the artificial intelligence that controls everything from computer characters to subtle background color changes. Artificial intelligence is particularly important for sports games like John Madden Football 2003. It handles everything from complex player shifts to players blinking their eyes. This year's breakthrough allows players to squeeze past players on their own, something that has frustrated players in the past."  Nuts-and-Bolts Ballplayer for a Space-Age Infield. By Lee Jenkins. The New York Times (June 10, 2006). "The player is best described as a machine -- cameras for eyes, tires for legs, a motor for a heartbeat and a computer for a brain. This is the type of quicksilver infielder who can calculate the speed of a line drive and run it down almost every time. But before the budding shortstop is ranked by Baseball America, developmental experts agree on one issue that needs to be addressed. 'He's going to need a name,' said Thomas G. Sugar, a robotics engineer at Arizona State University. 'He has to be robo-something.' ... Sugar and [Michael K.] McBeath received a grant for this project from the National Science Foundation, not because baseball needs more robotic players, but because Sugar and McBeath are trying to create machines to perform simple human tasks. If a robot is able to field a ground ball, it might be able to help a stroke victim fetch a glass of water. 'It's an interesting problem for people in robotics,' McBeath said. 'It's an interesting problem for people in robotics,' McBeath said. 'The fact that it applies to sports just makes it more interesting.'" A Tracking System That Calls Balls and Strikes. By David F. Gallagher. The New York Times (March 28, 2002; no-fee reg. req'd). "The system's eyes are two cameras perched high on the rim of the stadium, one on either side of the diamond. The cameras send video feeds to a standard Dell PC at the QuesTec command post in a windowless room near the Mets clubhouse. The PC is equipped with special software that analyzes frames of the incoming video looking for a baseball-like moving object while ignoring pigeons and flying hot-dog wrappers. ... The data is available almost instantly, allowing the computer to create a broadcast-ready, 3-D reconstruction of the ball's path before a human has time to set up the video replay." I, Pool Shark - Real science still lags behind the sci-fi fantasies of I, Robot, but android power is on the rise. By Anne McIlroy. The Globe and Mail (July 24, 2004). "In a hot, stuffy lab at Queen's University, half a dozen engineering students hunch over their computers, seemingly oblivious to the distraction offered by the pool table in the corner. Their ability to resist temptation may have something to do with the cue-wielding contraption that hangs over the table. A metal frame suspended from the ceiling supports a mechanized arm, which is guided by a camera that helps it to 'see.' With a satisfying whir, the arm pulls back and then crisply whacks a billiard ball into a pocket. Meet Deep Green, the brainchild of Queen's robotics expert Michael Greenspan. ... Dr. Greenspan and his students are determined to turn the computer-driven mechanism into the world's best pool shark -- a machine capable of humbling the greatest human player. ... Deep Green may lead to advances in artificial vision systems, including ways to help robots better interpret colour, but the project itself is part of a trend toward making robots that entertain humans."  Smart pool table improves play. BBC (November 1, 2002). "Scientists at Aalborg University in Denmark have devised a smart pool table. An overhead camera and laser placed above the interactive table watch the ball play, with a laser beam drawing shapes on the table pointing out the best shots. A virtual coach called James, connected to the table via a computer, will help you improve your play with a series of exercises." Games Fit for Kings - Video game reviews. By Bob Borgen. FOXSports.com (January 20, 2003). "Home video games have been around for more than a quarter century, but in the last five years technological advances have taken the video game industry to a level of sophistication that was unimaginable back in the 1970's. These days the graphics, artificial intelligence and depth of story can make sports games nearly as realistic as the real thing. And today's action/adventure video games rival anything seen on the big screen. ... When athletes take to the road, now they take their video games with them, to play in hotel rooms and even on airplanes as they travel between cities. In this first of an occasional series, we'll hear from some of the L.A. Kings hockey players about what they like (and dislike) in video games, and catch up on the latest titles they are playing." Now Anyone Can Make a Discovery. By Tariq Malik. SCIENCE.com (November 20, 2001). "Astronomy's next great discovery may be found not by telescope, but instead with little more than a laptop computer, an Internet connection and a learned and persistent amateur. In fact, astronomers are already pulling new findings from old data, the start of what some say is a looming change in how science gets done. ... Even some professional coaches in the National Basketball Association have taken to data-mining. They use a computer program called Advanced Scout to study the statistics and performances of opposing teams in order to develop more effective strategies in future games." 
 See images of Laura, the Exercise Advisor, on Timothy Bickmore's page about Relational Agents. "Recent work demonstrated the ability of relational agents to establish and maintain relationships with people over a series of interactions. In this effort, the agent played the role of an exercise advisor designed to motivate users to exercise more. One hundered subjects participated in a six-week study longitudinal study (four week intervention and two week follow up) to determine the efficacy of this agent. Results indicate that the agent was successful at creating and maintaining a trusting, caring relationship with users and increasing their desire to continue interacting with it."
 If a Machine Creates Something Beautiful, Is It an Artist? By Dylan Loeb McClain. The New York Times (January 25, 2003; subscription req'd.). "Jonathan Schaeffer, a professor of computer science at the University of Alberta who created Chinook, the best checkers playing entity in the world, thinks that checkers and chess are art and sport, regardless of how well computers play them." 
The Golf Buddy: Artificial intelligence will coach you through your trouble spots--and the course. Business Week (March 6, 2000). FSI-All Japan Robot-Sumo Tournament: "Through building robots, the students and public will acquire robotic technology fundamentals and research skills, be given the opportunity to demonstrate their creativity, and learn the joy of engineering."
The International Association on Computer Science in Sport (IACSS). Related AI Topics Pages
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