The NFL on Monday opened up the challenge to use community resources to help the league analyze and identify player contacts in games using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Challenges are part of the NFL’s Innovative partnership with AWS to create Digital AthletesVirtual simulation of an NFL player will help the league predict and prevent player injuries.
The challenge hosted on Kaggle, an online community that invites data scientists and machine learning experts to solve real-world challenges using datasets. The NFL’s Contact Detection Challenge will be open until March 1, 2023, and the first prize will be $50,000.
The goal of the competition is to detect the physical contact that players experience during the game. Participants will watch game movies to analyze player exposure moments and help improve player safety. Then, machine learning and computer vision will help the NFL identify moments that players experience contact with each other during a football game.
In previous NFL-sponsored Kaggle competitions, participants assisted the tournament in the creation of helmet impact detection and recognition algorithms, but the league is looking to go one step further. The results of the Contact Detection Challenge aim to improve the tournament’s ability to predict when players will come into contact with each other and with the ground.
The NFL says these results will “improve the NFL’s ability to quantify when on-court collisions occur, allowing the league to better predict – and ultimately prevent – player injuries,” according to the press release.
The NFL and AWS’ partnership to create Digital Athletes is a multi-year technological feat that will provide the NFL with quantifiable data to help predict and prevent serious player injuries. play.
Digital Athlete will act as an automated test NFL player who will experience countless simulations of football matches based on in-game data analyzed by participants on Kaggle.
The digital athlete will provide the tournament with information that determines the safety of players based on the type of shoes the players wear, the surface they play on, weather conditions and many other factors.
Data extracted from Digital Athlete simulations will allow the NFL to build better injury training and recovery programs, conduct real-time injury risk analysis in matches and help the federation develop improved rules for player safety.
The NFL-AWS partnership could help prevent injuries like the one that happened to Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa. During the third and fourth weeks of the current NFL season, he has head and neck injuriesdrew scrutiny from the NFL Players Association, fans, and past and current NFL stars.
Simulations can also demonstrate Risks when playing on slot grass. Recently, Players have complained of lower extremity joint pain and sprains caused by the pitch. While they are not serious injuries, Digital Athletes can help the league understand what causes the turf to cause them, how to treat them, and how to minimize them.
