Grossniklaus, Michael
0000-0003-1609-2221 Berufsbeschreibung
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Where to go : Computational and visual what-if analyses in soccer
To prepare their teams for upcoming matches, analysts in professional soccer watch and manually annotate up to three matches a day. When annotating matches, domain experts try to identify and improve suboptimal movements based on intuition and professional experience. The high amount of matches needing to be analysed manually result in a tedious and time-consuming process, and results may be subjective. We propose an automatic approach for the realisation of effective region-based what-if analyses in soccer. Our system covers the automatic detection of region-based faulty movement behaviour, as well as the automatic suggestion of possible improved alternative movements. As we show, our approach effectively supports analysts and coaches investigating matches by speeding up previously time-consuming work. We enable domain experts to include their domain knowledge in the analysis process by allowing to interactively adjust suggested improved movement, as well as its implications on region control. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed approach via an expert study with three invited domain experts, one being head coach from the first Austrian soccer league. As our results show that experts most often agree with the suggested player movement (83%), our proposed approach enhances the analytical capabilities in soccer and supports a more efficient analysis.
From Movement to Events : Improving Soccer Match Annotations
Match analysis has become an important task in everyday work at professional soccer clubs in order to improve team performance. Video analysts regularly spend up to several days analyzing and summarizing matches based on tracked and annotated match data. Although there already exists extensive capabilities to track the movement of players and the ball from multimedia data sources such as video recordings, there is no capability to sufficiently detect dynamic and complex events within these data. As a consequence, analysts have to rely on manually created annotations, which are very time-consuming and expensive to create. We propose a novel method for the semi-automatic definition and detection of events based entirely on movement data of players and the ball. Incorporating Allen’s interval algebra into a visual analytics system, we enable analysts to visually define as well as search for complex, hierarchical events. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach by quantitatively comparing our automatically detected events with manually annotated events from a professional data provider as well as several expert interviews. The results of our evaluation show that the required annotation time for complete matches by using our system can be reduced to a few seconds while achieving a similar level of performance.
Bring It to the Pitch : Combining Video and Movement Data to Enhance Team Sport Analysis
Analysts in professional team sport regularly perform analysis to gain strategic and tactical insights into player and team behavior. Goals of team sport analysis regularly include identification of weaknesses of opposing teams, or assessing performance and improvement potential of a coached team. Current analysis workflows are typically based on the analysis of team videos. Also, analysts can rely on techniques from Information Visualization, to depict e.g., player or ball trajectories. However, video analysis is typically a time-consuming process, where the analyst needs to memorize and annotate scenes. In contrast, visualization typically relies on an abstract data model, often using abstract visual mappings, and is not directly linked to the observed movement context anymore. We propose a visual analytics system that tightly integrates team sport video recordings with abstract visualization of underlying trajectory data. We apply appropriate computer vision techniques to extract trajectory data from video input. Furthermore, we apply advanced trajectory and movement analysis techniques to derive relevant team sport analytic measures for region, event and player analysis in the case of soccer analysis. Our system seamlessly integrates video and visualization modalities, enabling analysts to draw on the advantages of both analysis forms. Several expert studies conducted with team sport analysts indicate the effectiveness of our integrated approach.
How to Make Sense of Team Sport Data : From Acquisition to Data Modeling and Research Aspects
Automatic and interactive data analysis is instrumental in making use of increasing amounts of complex data. Owing to novel sensor modalities, analysis of data generated in professional team sport leagues such as soccer, baseball, and basketball has recently become of concern, with potentially high commercial and research interest. The analysis of team ball games can serve many goals, e.g., in coaching to understand effects of strategies and tactics, or to derive insights improving performance. Also, it is often decisive to trainers and analysts to understand why a certain movement of a player or groups of players happened, and what the respective influencing factors are. We consider team sport as group movement including collaboration and competition of individuals following specific rule sets. Analyzing team sports is a challenging problem as it involves joint understanding of heterogeneous data perspectives, including high-dimensional, video, and movement data, as well as considering team behavior and rules (constraints) given in the particular team sport. We identify important components of team sport data, exemplified by the soccer case, and explain how to analyze team sport data in general. We identify challenges arising when facing these data sets and we propose a multi-facet view and analysis including pattern detection, context-aware analysis, and visual explanation. We also present applicable methods and technologies covering the heterogeneous aspects in team sport data.
Towards Reproducible Research of Event Detection Techniques for Twitter
A major challenge in many research areas is reproducibility of implementations, experiments, or evaluations. New data sources and research directions complicate the reproducibility even more. For example, Twitter continues to gain popularity as a source of up-to-date news and information. As a result, numerous event detection techniques have been proposed to cope with the steadily increasing rate and volume of social media data streams. Although some of these works provide their implementation or conduct an evaluation of the proposed technique, it is almost impossible to reproduce their experiments. The main drawback is that Twitter prohibits the release of crawled datasets that are used by researchers in their experiments. In this work, we present a survey of the vast landscape of implementations, experiments, and evaluations presented by the different research works. Furthermore, we propose a reproducibility toolkit including Twistor (Twitter Stream Simulator), which can be used to simulate an artificial Twitter data stream (including events) as input for the experiments or evaluations of event detection techniques. We further present the experimental application of the reproducibility toolkit to state-of-the-art event detection techniques.
Revealing the Invisible : Visual Analytics and Explanatory Storytelling for Advanced Team Sport Analysis
The analysis of invasive team sports often concentrates on cooperative and competitive aspects of collective movement behavior. A main goal is the identification and explanation of strategies, and eventually the development of new strategies. In visual sports analytics, a range of different visual-interactive analysis techniques have been proposed, e.g., based on visualization using for example trajectories, graphs, heatmaps, and animations. Identifying suitable visualizations for a specific situation is key to a successful analysis. Existing systems enable the interactive selection of different visualization facets to support the analysis process. However, an interactive selection of appropriate visualizations is a difficult, complex, and time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose a four-step analytics conceptual workflow for an automatic selection of appropriate views for key situations in soccer games. Our concept covers classification, specification, explanation, and alteration of match situations, effectively enabling the analysts to focus on important game situations and the determination of alternative moves. Combining abstract visualizations with real world video recordings by Immersive Visual Analytics and descriptive storylines, we support domain experts in understanding key situations. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed conceptual workflow via two proofs of concept and evaluate our system by comparing our results to manual video annotations by domain experts. Initial expert feedback shows that our proposed concept improves the understanding of competitive sports and leads to a more efficient data analysis.
Robustness Metrics for Relational Query Execution Plans
The quality of query execution plans in database systems determines how fast a query can be executed. It has been shown that conventional query optimization still selects suboptimal or even bad execution plans, due to errors in the cardinality estimation. Although cardinality estimation errors are an evident problem, they are in general not considered in the selection of query execution plans. In this paper, we present three novel metrics for the robustness of relational query execution plans w.r.t. cardinality estimation errors. We also present a novel plan selection strategy that takes both, estimated cost and estimated robustness into account, when choosing a plan for execution. Finally, we share the results of our experimental comparison between robust and conventional plan selection on real world and synthetic benchmarks, showing a speedup of at most factor 3:49.
Experiences with Implementing Landmark Embedding in Neo4j
Reachability, distance, and shortest path queries are fundamental operations in the field of graph data management with various applications in research and industry. However, while various preprocessing-based methods have been proposed to optimize the computation of such queries, the integration of existing methods into graph database management systems and processing frameworks has been limited. In this paper, we present an implementation of a static graph index that employs landmark embedding for Neo4j, to enable the index-based computation of reachability, distance, and shortest path queries on the database. We explore different strategies for selecting landmarks and different schemes for storing the precomputed landmark distances. To evaluate the efficiency of each landmark selection strategy and each storage scheme, we conduct an experimental evaluation using four real-world network datasets. We measure the preprocessing cost, the query processing time, and the accuracy of the distance estimation of different configurations of our index structure.
Leveraging annotation-based modeling with JUMP
The capability of UML profiles to serve as annotation mechanism has been recognized in both research and industry. Today’s modeling tools offer profiles specific to platforms, such as Java, as they facilitate model-based engineering approaches. However, considering the large number of possible annotations in Java, manually developing the corresponding profiles would only be achievable by huge development and maintenance efforts. Thus, leveraging annotation-based modeling requires an automated approach capable of generating platform-specific profiles from Java libraries. To address this challenge, we present the fully automated transformation chain realized by Jump, thereby continuing existing mapping efforts between Java and UML by emphasizing on annotations and profiles. The evaluation of Jump shows that it scales for large Java libraries and generates profiles of equal or even improved quality compared to profiles currently used in practice. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical value of Jump by contributing profiles that facilitate reverse engineering and forward engineering processes for the Java platform by applying it to a modernization scenario.
Bucket Selection : A Model-Independent Diverse Selection Strategy for Widening
When using a greedy algorithm for finding a model, as is the case in many data mining algorithms, there is a risk of getting caught in local extrema, i.e., suboptimal solutions. Widening is a technique for enhancing greedy algorithms by using parallel resources to broaden the search in the model space. The most important component of widening is the selector, a function that chooses the next models to refine. This selector ideally enforces diversity within the selected set of models in order to ensure that parallel workers explore sufficiently different parts of the model space and do not end up mimicking a simple beam search. Previous publications have shown that this works well for problems with a suitable distance measure for the models, but if no such measure is available, applying widening is challenging. In addition these approaches require extensive, sequential computations for diverse subset selection, making the entire process much slower than the original greedy algorithm. In this paper we propose the bucket selector, a model-independent randomized selection strategy. We find that (a) the bucket selector is a lot faster and not significantly worse when a diversity measure exists and (b) it performs better than existing selection strategies in cases without a diversity measure.