Category Archives: lab stuff

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Grand Master Choi, President of the International Taekwon-Do Federation, visits the lab

Grand Master ChoiYesterday, we were honoured by an informal visit from Grand Master Choi Jung Hwa, Grand Master Han, Master Michael Muleta and Mr Spiridon Cariotis to our new lab to talk about our martial arts research program. So far, we have published a paper on the impact of marketing a martial art as a sport, and we have considered the curriculum of taekwon-do in terms of its structured development of 4D spatiotemporal awareness (3 dimensions of space, plus a fourth dimension of time) and its role in the development of expert skilled performance. We discussed the potential of using our Qualisys motion capture system to capture kinematic information for use in research and in training.

ChoiVisit2sm While one primary focus of interest is with respect to the force and velocity generated by different techniques and different ways of moving, we also discussed research on decision-making and “reading the play” in sparring and self-defence scenarios, including in terms of judging and refereeing tournaments, and in the context of evaluating threats and interpreting aggressive intent.

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More CCTV camera footage may not deter violent crime

From an article in The Age on CCTV monitoring to reduce crime: two interesting issues emerge wrt out work. The first relates to information overload monitoring what is going on on all the cameras, and the second is interpreting violent intent from distal visual information alone.

The immediate challenge when monitoring CCTV is information overload. With so many cameras and crowds of people passing by, identifying where trouble may occur is prohibitively complex. The absence of sound greatly compounds this problem (thankfully plans to attach microphones to cameras have so far met with implacable opposition). Is that man talking to a girlfriend or intimidating a vulnerable stranger? Are those two men about to start throwing punches or are they simply mucking around? In the absence of more detailed information, camera operators are unable to make an informed judgment.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/cameras-eye-on-the-streets-is-little-more-than-pie-in-the-sky-20121004-2725n.html#ixzz28OSfQOWj

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Motion Capture Blog

This site has been created for use by members of my lab to share information, ideas, reading, data analysis techniques and the like. The main focus of our research is to understand the development of expert skilled performance, and the three areas of research endeavour at the moment are:

  1. the development of expert skilled performance in martial arts
  2. ab initio flying training in fixed wing and rotary wing aircraft
  3. the development of cognitive skills and discipline-based expertise in academia

The lead researchers in the lab are Dr Lisa Wise, Dr Jason Skues, and Dr Ben Williams, and our key subject matter expert and research associate for Martial Arts is Sabum Spiridon Cariotis. Our research assistants are Ignacio Bruhn Larrain, Tim Wise and Moira Williamson.