Abstract

Research: Modeling the Model Athlete : Automatic Coaching of Rowing Technique, Simon Fothergill

Watching athletes allows coaches to provide both vital feedback on how well they are performing and on ways to improve their technique without causing or aggravating injuries. The thoroughness and accuracy of this traditional observation method are limited by human ability and availability. Supplementing coaches with sensor systems that generate accurate feedback on any technical aspect of the performance gives athletes a fall back if they do not have enough confidence in their coach’s assessment.

A system is presented to model the quality of arbitrary aspects of rowing technique found to be inconsistently well performed by a set of novice rowers when using an ergometer. Using only the motion of the handle, tracked using a high-fidelity motion capture system, a coach trains the system with their idea of the skill-level exhibited during each performance, by labeling example trajectories. Misclassification of unseen performances is encouragingly low, even for unknown performers.

Research: Efficient Medium Access Control, Bogdan Roman

We are rapidly moving towards a wireless world. Networks will only grow in size along with the number of active users. This, combined with the increasing demand for multimedia applications and, many times, mobility make medium access control a high priority for efficient communication. This talk will present a collection of techniques that are applicable to both wireless and wired networks and which are able to substantially improve several aspects such as raw performance, scalability, guaranteed Quality of Service, topology independence and others. Some of the techniques presented can also be for randomized leader election, channel initialization or in cooperative networks.