5,585 research outputs found

    Exploiting Opponent Modeling For Learning In Multi-agent Adversarial Games

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    An issue with learning effective policies in multi-agent adversarial games is that the size of the search space can be prohibitively large when the actions of both teammates and opponents are considered simultaneously. Opponent modeling, predicting an opponent’s actions in advance of execution, is one approach for selecting actions in adversarial settings, but it is often performed in an ad hoc way. In this dissertation, we introduce several methods for using opponent modeling, in the form of predictions about the players’ physical movements, to learn team policies. To explore the problem of decision-making in multi-agent adversarial scenarios, we use our approach for both offline play generation and real-time team response in the Rush 2008 American football simulator. Simultaneously predicting the movement trajectories, future reward, and play strategies of multiple players in real-time is a daunting task but we illustrate how it is possible to divide and conquer this problem with an assortment of data-driven models. By leveraging spatio-temporal traces of player movements, we learn discriminative models of defensive play for opponent modeling. With the reward information from previous play matchups, we use a modified version of UCT (Upper Conference Bounds applied to Trees) to create new offensive plays and to learn play repairs to counter predicted opponent actions. iii In team games, players must coordinate effectively to accomplish tasks while foiling their opponents either in a preplanned or emergent manner. An effective team policy must generate the necessary coordination, yet considering all possibilities for creating coordinating subgroups is computationally infeasible. Automatically identifying and preserving the coordination between key subgroups of teammates can make search more productive by pruning policies that disrupt these relationships. We demonstrate that combining opponent modeling with automatic subgroup identification can be used to create team policies with a higher average yardage than either the baseline game or domain-specific heuristics

    Towards Commentary-Driven Soccer Player Analytics

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    Open information extraction (open IE) has been shown to be useful in a number of NLP Tasks, such as question answering, relation extraction, and information retrieval. Soccer is the most watched sport in the world. The dynamic nature of the game corresponds to the team strategy and individual contribution, which are the deciding factors for a team’s success. Generally, companies collect sports event data manually and very rarely they allow free-access to these data by third parties. However, a large amount of data is available freely on various social media platforms where different types of users discuss these very events. To rely on expert data, we are currently using the live-match commentary as our rich and unexplored data-source. Our aim out of this commentary analysis is to initially extract key events from each game and eventually key entities like players involved, player action and other player related attributes from these key events. We propose an end-to-end application to extract commentaries and extract player attributes from it. The study will primarily depend on an extensive crowd labelling of data involving precautionary periodical checks to prevent incorrectly tagged data. This research will contribute significantly towards analysis of commentary and acts as a cheap tool providing player performance analysis for smaller to intermediate budget soccer club

    A KD framework in football data analytics: a value co-creation framework for the use of knowledge discovery technologies in the football industry

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    Investment in sport technologies are expected to grow by 40.1% during 2016-2022 reaching approximately $3.97 billion by 2022. As well the recent changes in technology regulations by The Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) since the 2018 World Cup created promising football technologies. This research questions addressing the issue of what is the value of such technologies for professional football teams? and what are the benefits of these technologies? This is achieved by developing a framework for understanding the value co-creation process from the knowledge discovery systems in the football industry. The framework aids in mapping the resources, pinpointing the outputs, identifying the competencies leading into capabilities, and finally in realisation of the value of the final outcomes in that journey. On another words, different teams have different resources that allow them to achieve certain outputs. These outputs enable the coaching team to achieve and maintain certain abilities. By changes in practice the will improve the team ability and enhance their analytical capabilities. Therefore, that will allow and aid the coaching team to gain new outcomes such as improving training strategies, transferring players, and informative match strategies. Additionally, improved understanding of the value co-creation process from the knowledge discovery systems in the football industry answering, why are some teams better able to gain value from investment in knowledge discovery technologies than other teams in the football industry. The framework has been developed in three phases in which semi-structured interviews where used in the first and second phases for developing and validating the framework respectively. The third and final phases is verifying the framework by developing a knowledge discovery maturity model as an online assessment s tool in operationalising the research findings. The main contributions of this research are the adaptation and customisation of Melville et al. (2004) to develop a value co-creation process form knowledge discovery resources. Moreover, applying Agile (APM, 2015) artefacts and techniques and tools in improving the value co-creation process between coaches and data analysts. That s aided in developing the value co-creation knowledge discovery framework in football analytics. Additionally, the development of a key performance indicators balanced scorecard and its adaptation as a in understanding the relationships between the key performance indicators (i.e. physical, psychological, technical and tactical performance indicators). Finally, the development of the knowledge discovery maturity model in football analytics which was used in understanding and pinpointing areas of strength and weakness in the utilisation of the various football resources used in football analytics (human resources, technological resources, value co-creation resources and analytical models used)

    Algorithms for the Analysis of Spatio-Temporal Data from Team Sports

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    Modern object tracking systems are able to simultaneously record trajectories—sequences of time-stamped location points—for large numbers of objects with high frequency and accuracy. The availability of trajectory datasets has resulted in a consequent demand for algorithms and tools to extract information from these data. In this thesis, we present several contributions intended to do this, and in particular, to extract information from trajectories tracking football (soccer) players during matches. Football player trajectories have particular properties that both facilitate and present challenges for the algorithmic approaches to information extraction. The key property that we look to exploit is that the movement of the players reveals information about their objectives through cooperative and adversarial coordinated behaviour, and this, in turn, reveals the tactics and strategies employed to achieve the objectives. While the approaches presented here naturally deal with the application-specific properties of football player trajectories, they also apply to other domains where objects are tracked, for example behavioural ecology, traffic and urban planning

    Collective behaviour monitoring in football using spatial temporal and network analysis: application and evaluations.

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    Analysis is an important part of understanding and exploiting performance of football teams. Traditional approaches of analysis have centred around events that may not fully incorporate the highly dynamic nature of matches. To circumvent this weakness, applications of collective behaviour metrics applying spatial temporal and social network analyses to data in football have been trending over the last 10 years. The aims of this PhD were to: 1) establish the strengths and limitations of current research investigating collective behaviour in football applying novel analytical procedures; 2) investigate the credibility of present methods informing coaching practice; and 3) provide guidance for practitioners in implementing complex analytical procedures with current data collection methods. These aims were achieved through the completion of five interlinked studies. The first two studies comprised systematic reviews evaluating the quality of previous research investigating collective behaviours. The first systematic review focussed on spatial temporal metrics and the second systematic review focussed on social network analysis metrics. In addition to standard review procedures, both systematic reviews included analyses of author quotes regarding the metrics used within each study. These included description and conceptualisation of each metric, along with practical applications and measurements of reliability. The first systematic review identified several limitations in the current literature base of spatial temporal metrics investigating collective behaviour in football. These included a lack of conceptualisation of the metrics used, assumptions of metric reliability, frequent use of broad and non-actionable practical recommendations, failure to justify sample sizes and a bias towards including males. Similar findings were found in the social network analysis systematic review where authors also seldom conceptualised metrics, provided vague practical applications and often failed to justify sample size. Literature including social network analysis were also inconsistent with the metric calculations and nearly all studies investigated elite male matches. The third study in this PhD attempted to quantify the reliability of spatial temporal metrics by simulating expected error values on top of real-world data. Through fitting linear mixed effects models on signal to noise ratios, metrics were established to be reliable where positioning systems are accurate to 0.5 m or less. In situations where positioning systems errors were approached 2 m, only some were considered to produce reliable values, (e.g. team centroid), whereas metrics using distances and numerical relations were considered to produce unreliable values. After assessing the literature and reliability, the PhD focussed on implementation of common and reliable metrics, leading into the final study of the PhD which employed an iterative design comprising multiple interviews to investigate coach perceptions of collective behaviour metrics. A thematic analysis identified themes that closely resembled the 10 traditional principles of play in football, further establishing their validity. Moreover, coaches reacted positively to presented measurements, most notable network intensity, distance between defenders, triads, team length, and team depth. Coaches stated they trained players with the concepts these measurements represent as a central focus. The PhD work was concluded with a final chapter set as pedagogical support for practitioners wishing to implement these techniques providing a guide to measuring the tactical concepts discussed within this thesis. Collectively, this PhD highlights that novel collective behaviour metrics have a place in current performance analysis systems in football. Additionally, a methodology is presented for practitioners to apply to their own teams and generate specific metrics relevant to the teams own tactical principles

    VIRD: Immersive Match Video Analysis for High-Performance Badminton Coaching

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    Badminton is a fast-paced sport that requires a strategic combination of spatial, temporal, and technical tactics. To gain a competitive edge at high-level competitions, badminton professionals frequently analyze match videos to gain insights and develop game strategies. However, the current process for analyzing matches is time-consuming and relies heavily on manual note-taking, due to the lack of automatic data collection and appropriate visualization tools. As a result, there is a gap in effectively analyzing matches and communicating insights among badminton coaches and players. This work proposes an end-to-end immersive match analysis pipeline designed in close collaboration with badminton professionals, including Olympic and national coaches and players. We present VIRD, a VR Bird (i.e., shuttle) immersive analysis tool, that supports interactive badminton game analysis in an immersive environment based on 3D reconstructed game views of the match video. We propose a top-down analytic workflow that allows users to seamlessly move from a high-level match overview to a detailed game view of individual rallies and shots, using situated 3D visualizations and video. We collect 3D spatial and dynamic shot data and player poses with computer vision models and visualize them in VR. Through immersive visualizations, coaches can interactively analyze situated spatial data (player positions, poses, and shot trajectories) with flexible viewpoints while navigating between shots and rallies effectively with embodied interaction. We evaluated the usefulness of VIRD with Olympic and national-level coaches and players in real matches. Results show that immersive analytics supports effective badminton match analysis with reduced context-switching costs and enhances spatial understanding with a high sense of presence.Comment: To Appear in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE VIS), 202

    Eye quietness and quiet eye in expert and novice golf performance: an electrooculographic analysis

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    Quiet eye (QE) is the final ocular fixation on the target of an action (e.g., the ball in golf putting). Camerabased eye-tracking studies have consistently found longer QE durations in experts than novices; however, mechanisms underlying QE are not known. To offer a new perspective we examined the feasibility of measuring the QE using electrooculography (EOG) and developed an index to assess ocular activity across time: eye quietness (EQ). Ten expert and ten novice golfers putted 60 balls to a 2.4 m distant hole. Horizontal EOG (2ms resolution) was recorded from two electrodes placed on the outer sides of the eyes. QE duration was measured using a EOG voltage threshold and comprised the sum of the pre-movement and post-movement initiation components. EQ was computed as the standard deviation of the EOG in 0.5 s bins from –4 to +2 s, relative to backswing initiation: lower values indicate less movement of the eyes, hence greater quietness. Finally, we measured club-ball address and swing durations. T-tests showed that total QE did not differ between groups (p = .31); however, experts had marginally shorter pre-movement QE (p = .08) and longer post-movement QE (p < .001) than novices. A group × time ANOVA revealed that experts had less EQ before backswing initiation and greater EQ after backswing initiation (p = .002). QE durations were inversely correlated with EQ from –1.5 to 1 s (rs = –.48 - –.90, ps = .03 - .001). Experts had longer swing durations than novices (p = .01) and, importantly, swing durations correlated positively with post-movement QE (r = .52, p = .02) and negatively with EQ from 0.5 to 1s (r = –.63, p = .003). This study demonstrates the feasibility of measuring ocular activity using EOG and validates EQ as an index of ocular activity. Its findings challenge the dominant perspective on QE and provide new evidence that expert-novice differences in ocular activity may reflect differences in the kinematics of how experts and novices execute skills
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