Sustainable Design, Innovation, and Climate Change: Design Developer Competition as Governance and Response to Future Challenges

The paper discusses a design developer competition in Sweden. The competition is organized by the Norrk\uf6ping municipality and has been conducted as a joint effort by the public authority, academia, and private companies. The task was to design and build rental apartments. The winning designs are intended to be implemented in an agreement between the developer and the municipality. The paper will focus on the benefits and drawbacks of early steering in housing design through developing a research-supported competition program for sustainable design and innovative solutions for reducing energy use and climate impact, including the response to these challenges by the winning design team.Steering PrinciplesThe paper adopts a simple model of municipal governance for the competition process. The model is based on four principles. The first is steering by competitor (design team). The organizer has invited companies to submit expressions of interest along with reference projects and company information, working methods, and an organizational structure for the project indicating professional responsibility for architecture, energy, and climate impact. After prequalification, five out of twelve multidisciplinary design teams were selected for the competition. The second principle is steering by competition program. In this case, the municipality requires the selected design teams to produce design proposals according to a competition program that specifies objectives, delivery demands, and judging criteria. Research-based appendices have been added for descript-tions of design strategies that support social sustainability, templates for making climate declarations and presentations of energy solutions, information on circularity (including recycling), and innovative aspects of the proposal. The third principle is steering by design. The jury identifies the overall best solution. Two external experts have been added to a jury of in-house professionals (civil servants) employed at the municipality. The power of picking a winner is thus shared with “outsiders.” The developer behind the winning design will be granted access to the site according to the competition program and can implement the proposal after agreement with a municipality. A land allocation agreement has been signed. The resulting contract to transfer ownership of the site to the winning developer is not included in this study.Aim and ResultThe paper has an explorative approach. The aim is to describe and critically examine the first steps in a design developer competition: 1) invitation and prequalification, 2) programming the compe-tition task and constructing design teams, and 3) identifying good solutions and articulating the motivation for the selection of the winning design. The findings in the case study are presented in nine specific conclusions from the process of inviting and selcting design teams to programming the competition and eventually singling out the proposal the the best overall solution. Regarding climate footprint, energy, circularity, and design for flexible apartments, the competition can be seen as successful

How to Host a Data Competition: Statistical Advice for Design and Analysis of a Data Competition

Data competitions rely on real-time leaderboards to rank competitor entries and stimulate algorithm improvement. While such competitions have become quite popular and prevalent, particularly in supervised learning formats, their implementations by the host are highly variable. Without careful planning, a supervised learning competition is vulnerable to overfitting, where the winning solutions are so closely tuned to the particular set of provided data that they cannot generalize to the underlying problem of interest to the host. This paper outlines some important considerations for strategically designing relevant and informative data sets to maximize the learning outcome from hosting a competition based on our experience. It also describes a post-competition analysis that enables robust and efficient assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of solutions from different competitors, as well as greater understanding of the regions of the input space that are well-solved. The post-competition analysis, which complements the leaderboard, uses exploratory data analysis and generalized linear models (GLMs). The GLMs not only expand the range of results we can explore, they also provide more detailed analysis of individual sub-questions including similarities and differences between algorithms across different types of scenarios, universally easy or hard regions of the input space, and different learning objectives. When coupled with a strategically planned data generation approach, the methods provide richer and more informative summaries to enhance the interpretation of results beyond just the rankings on the leaderboard. The methods are illustrated with a recently completed competition to evaluate algorithms capable of detecting, identifying, and locating radioactive materials in an urban environment.Comment: 36 page

Scoring dynamics across professional team sports: tempo, balance and predictability

Despite growing interest in quantifying and modeling the scoring dynamics within professional sports games, relative little is known about what patterns or principles, if any, cut across different sports. Using a comprehensive data set of scoring events in nearly a dozen consecutive seasons of college and professional (American) football, professional hockey, and professional basketball, we identify several common patterns in scoring dynamics. Across these sports, scoring tempo---when scoring events occur---closely follows a common Poisson process, with a sport-specific rate. Similarly, scoring balance---how often a team wins an event---follows a common Bernoulli process, with a parameter that effectively varies with the size of the lead. Combining these processes within a generative model of gameplay, we find they both reproduce the observed dynamics in all four sports and accurately predict game outcomes. These results demonstrate common dynamical patterns underlying within-game scoring dynamics across professional team sports, and suggest specific mechanisms for driving them. We close with a brief discussion of the implications of our results for several popular hypotheses about sports dynamics.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables, 2 appendice

A probabilistic model for explaining the points achieved by a team in football competition. Forecasting and regression with applications to the Spanish competition

In the last decades, a lot of research papers applying statistical methods for analysing sports data have been published. Football, also called soccer, is one of the most popular sports all over the world organised in national championships in a round robin format in which the team reaching the most points at the end of the tournament wins the competition. The aim of this work is to develop a suitable probability model for studying the points achieved by a team in a football match. For this purpose, we built a discrete probability distribution taking values, zero for losing, one for a draw and three for a victory. We test its performance using data from the Spanish Football League (First division) during the 2013-14 season. Furthermore, the model provides an attractive framework for predicting points and incorporating covariates in order to study the factors affecting the points achieved by the teams.Peer Reviewe

Manipulating Tournaments in Cup and Round Robin Competitions

In sports competitions, teams can manipulate the result by, for instance, throwing games. We show that we can decide how to manipulate round robin and cup competitions, two of the most popular types of sporting competitions in polynomial time. In addition, we show that finding the minimal number of games that need to be thrown to manipulate the result can also be determined in polynomial time. Finally, we show that there are several different variations of standard cup competitions where manipulation remains polynomial.Comment: Proceedings of Algorithmic Decision Theory, First International Conference, ADT 2009, Venice, Italy, October 20-23, 200

Analyzing Multidisciplinary Team Effectiveness in an Engineering Environment: A Case Study of the West Point Steel Bridge Design Team

The West Point Steel Bridge Design Team is a group of five undergraduate seniors working to design and build a steel bridge for the annual ASCE Steel Bridge Competition. The purpose of our group’s research is to discover how multidisciplinary teams perform in academically competitive environments. This project provides a unique opportunity in the field of multidisciplinary collaborative work because the team’s success can be objectively measured against this year’s competitors and the team’s performance in previous years. The traditional structure of the West Point team consisted of three-to-five civil engineering majors. This year’s team includes a law and legal studies major and five civil engineers, two of which recently switched from systems engineering. Past designs have relied heavily on the work of previous years, which has led to stagnant performance at competitions. Our hypothesis is that by entering different perspectives into the group at an early stage, a revolutionary approach will ensue and overall performance will increase. The team did not completely disregard the designs and methods of previous teams, but the reliance on their decision-making process was more heavily scrutinized with the current multidisciplinary team. Our research is not solely limited to competitive performance. We also analyzed the decision-making process of this year’s team in comparison to previous years. While data on decision-making is not readily available, both the faculty advisor and two current team members who served on the team last year were able to provide personal insight into how the teams compare. Ultimately, this research seeks to provide groups in similar academically competitive environments an indication of whether a multidisciplinary composition will provide benefit to their team’s performance.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Comparing league formats with respect to match importance in Belgian football

Recently, most clubs in the highest Belgian football division have become convinced that the format of their league should be changed. Moreover, the TV station that broadcasts the league is pleading for a more attractive competition. However, the clubs have not been able to agree on a new league format, mainly because they have conflicting interests. In this paper, we compare the current league format, and three other formats that have been considered by the Royal Belgian Football Association. We simulate the course of each of these league formats, based on historical match results. We assume that the attractiveness of a format is determined by the importance of its games; our importance measure for a game is based on the number of teams for which this game can be decisive to reach a given goal. Furthermore, we provide an overview of how each league format aligns with the expectations and interests of each type of club