A Method for Using Player Tracking Data in Basketball to Learn Player Skills and Predict Team Performance

Player tracking data represents a revolutionary new data source for basketball analysis, in which essentially every aspect of a player’s performance is tracked and can be analyzed numerically. We suggest a way by which this data set, when coupled with a network-style model of the offense that relates players’ skills to the team’s success at running different plays, can be used to automatically learn players’ skills and predict the performance of untested 5-man lineups in a way that accounts for the interaction between players’ respective skill sets. After developing a general analysis procedure, we present as an example a specific implementation of our method using a simplified network model. While player tracking data is not yet available in the public domain, we evaluate our model using simulated data and show that player skills can be accurately inferred by a simple statistical inference scheme. Finally, we use the model to analyze games from the 2011 playoff series between the Memphis Grizzlies and the Oklahoma City Thunder and we show that, even with a very limited data set, the model can consistently describe a player’s interactions with a given lineup based only on his performance with a different lineup

ArchivesSpace Adventures: A Migration

On February 4, 2019, the University Archives and Southern Minnesota Historical Center at Minnesota State University, Mankato successfully launched a new archival tool for our patrons called ArchivesSpace. While this at first glance may not seem like a big deal, the journey that the archives undertook to transform this search tool from a set of static HTML pages (all 700+ of them) to an easy-to-use search engine contained danger around every corner. The team had to fend off lions, tigers, and bears and had to blaze a path through a thick forest of metadata and archival records. The journey traveled down a dark and scary path; the path less traveled. At the path’s end, the archives team used their superpowers and a little magic, and thus emerged triumphant with a bright and shiny new archival tool called ArchivesSpace. Okay, so maybe this is exaggerating a little bit. There were no lions, tigers or bears, no forests, no superpowers, no magic, but like any good story, this one has a great ending. A small archives unit from a mid-sized university archive used teamwork, investigative know-how, learned from others, and partnered with those, who had some serious technology skills, to transform all those webpages into a better search experience for the patrons. The journey that follows speaks of how in collaboration with the library systems team, archives staff successfully built a local ArchivesSpace instance

Geometric Collision Avoidance for Heterogeneous Crowd Simulation

Simulation of human crowds can create plausible human trajectories, predict likely flows of pedestrians, and has application in areas such as games, movies, safety planning, and virtual environments. This dissertation presents new crowd simulation methods based on geometric techniques. I will show how geometric optimization techniques can be used to efficiently compute collision-avoidance constraints, and use these constraints to generate human-like trajectories in simulated environments. This process of reacting to the nearby environment is known as local navigation and it forms the basis for many crowd simulation techniques, including those described in this dissertation. Given the importance of local navigation computations, I devote much of this dissertation to the derivation, analysis, and implementation of new local navigation techniques. I discuss how to efficiently exploit parallelization features available on modern processors, and show how an efficient parallel implementation allows simulations of hundreds of thousands of agents in real time on many-core processors and tens of thousands of agents on multi-core CPUs. I analyze the macroscopic flows which arise from these geometric collision avoidance techniques and compare them to flows seen in real human crowds, both qualitatively (in terms of flow patterns) and quantitatively (in terms of flow rates). Building on the basis of these strong local navigation models, I further develop many important extensions to the simulation framework. Firstly, I develop a model for global navigation which allows for more complex scenarios by accounting for long-term planning around large obstacles or emergent congestion. Secondly, I demonstrate methods for using data-driven approaches to improve crowd simulations. These include using real-world data to automatically tune parameters, and using perceptual user study data to introduce behavioral variation. Finally, looking beyond geometric avoidance based crowd simulation methods, I discuss methods for objectively evaluating different crowd simulation strategies using statistical measures. Specifically, I focus on the problem of quantifying how closely a simulation approach matches real-world data. I propose a similarity metric that can be applied to a wide variety of simulation approaches and datasets. Taken together, the methods presented in this dissertation enable simulations of large, complex humans crowds with a level of realism and efficiency not previously possible.Doctor of Philosoph

Development of PDT/PET theranostics: synthesis and biological evaluation of an ¹⁸F-radiolabeled water soluble porphyrin

Synthesis of the first water-soluble porphyrin radiolabeled with fluorine-18 is described: a new molecular theranostic agent which integrates the therapeutic selectivity of photodynamic therapy (PDT) with the imaging efficacy of positron emission tomography (PET). Generation of the theranostic was carried out through the conjugation of a cationic water-soluble porphyrin bearing an azide functionality to a fluorine-18 radiolabeled prosthetic bearing an alkyne functionality through click conjugation, with excellent yields obtained in both cold and hot synthesis. Biological evaluation of the synthesized structures shows the first example of an 18 F-radiolabeled porphyrin retaining photocytotoxicity following radiolabeling and demonstrable conjugate uptake and potential application as a radiotracer in vivo. The promising results gained from biological evaluation demonstrate the potential of this structure as a clinically relevant theranostic agent, offering exciting possibilities for the simultaneous imaging and photodynamic treatment of tumors

ARCHON to ASpace: Adventures in Archives Migration

In August 2018, the University Archives and Southern Minnesota Historical Center at Minnesota State University, Mankato decided to migrate our finding aids and collection information from a hidden ARCHON database to a publicly available ArchivesSpace instance. This time sensitive decision was made with no budget available and in the midst of both a library system migration (Aleph to Alma/Primo) and an entire University website migration that affected us more than we initially thought. Three migrations is no big deal, right? This session will talk about our migration from design to implementation to “Oops! Where did that go?” We will share with you what worked and what didn’t in our path to creating a new searchable archives tool for our patrons

A survey of patient motion in disorders of consciousness and optimization of its retrospective correction.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can be seriously impaired by patient motion. The purpose of this study was to characterize the typical motion in a clinical population of patients in disorders of consciousness and compare the performance of retrospective correction with rigid-body realignment as implemented in widely used software packages. 63 subjects were scanned with an fMRI visual checkerboard paradigm using a 3T scanner. Time series were corrected for motion, and the resulting transformations were used to calculate a motion score. SPM, FSL, AFNI and AIR were evaluated by comparing the motion obtained by re-running the tool on the corrected data. A publicly available sample fMRI dataset was modified with the motion detected in each patient with each tool. The performance of each tool was measured by comparing the number of supra-threshold voxels after standard fMRI analysis, both in the sample dataset and in simulated fMRI data. We assessed the effect of user-changeable parameters on motion correction in SPM. We found the equivalent motion in the patient population to be 1.4mm on average. There was no significant difference in performance between SPM, FSL and AFNI. AIR was considerably worse, and took more time to run. We found that in SPM the quality factor and interpolation method have no effect on the cluster size, while higher separation and smoothing reduce it. We showed that the main packages SPM, FSL and AFNI are equally suitable for retrospective motion correction of fMRI time series. We show that typically only 80% of activated voxels are recovered by retrospective motion correction

Mumps and rubella surveillance in Victoria, 1993 to 2000

Despite improving childhood coverage of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR) in Victoria during the 1990s, mumps and rubella notifications in age groups eligible for vaccination persisted. This study reviewed the mumps and rubella surveillance data from 1993 to 2000 with a specific focus on method of diagnosis. There were 474 notifications of mumps over the seven-year period (annual median 61, range 40 to 77) and 3,544 notifications of rubella (annual median 297, range 66 to 1,165). The highest notifications rates for mumps were consistently among the 1-4 and 5-9 year age groups, whereas there was a marked change in the age distribution of rubella notifications during this interval. A large rubella outbreak occurred in 1995 with 1,165 notifications; the highest notification rates were males aged 15-24 years, infants under one year of age (males and females), and those aged 5-14 years (males and females), respectively. The susceptibility of 5-24 year olds reflects historical changes to the Australian Standard Vaccination Schedule. Rubella notifications returned to baseline levels in 1998 with the highest notification rates in infants aged under one year, and children aged 1-4 years. For both mumps and rubella, the majority of notifications for all age groups were clinically diagnosed, and were most common in children. Commun Dis Intell 2003;27:94-99