An 'app' helps organize sports events
José Pichel Andrés/DICYT Researchers at the Department of Informatics and Automatics at the University of Salamanca have developed an application for mobile phones that allows you to organize sports events. The idea is to facilitate the work of people who plan any competition, whatever the category and discipline, as well as other aspects related to sports practice, such as facilitating planning, advertising and enrollment in a tournament, its follow-up or location facilities.
"We intend to have a tool that may be used from the highest to the most basic level by the people responsible for the gym or any competition organizer because managing these types of events is not an easy task and each competition is different", states Vivian Félix López Batista to DiCYT. She is a professor at the Science College responsible for the project to.
The tasks that are part of the organization of competitions pass through the selection of infrastructure, the dissemination of the event, the distribution of information to participants, the creation of templates with all your data and the election of a competition system that agrees with the number of participants and with the characteristics of different sports, since there are not many similarities between a tennis tournament and a soccer match.
"Sometimes, the organizers are certain about the kind of competition they want to develop, but in other cases they are not and the application may tell them what would be the best option, for example, playoffs, league or a mixed system," says the researcher, who explains how the 'app' can make these kinds of smart decisions thanks to what is, technically, called a multi-agent system. The Multi-agent systems (MAS) are a branch of Distributed Artificial Intelligence which studies the behavior of intelligent agents that solve a problem cooperatively. Each of them has a specific and independent function, but all work together to get a better result.
Definitely, "intelligent agents are a number of entities that imitate logical processes or human behavior. You can have agents to help users, to perform certain tasks, to supervise or filter information”, she says.
This project comes from a final paper of the student of Computer Engineering Rubén Emilio Ramos Salamanca, who has created an 'app' for the organization of sporting events, but now, through the multi-agent system; it is improving and offering best results.
Precisely, the competition system’s recommender agent is the element that most stands out in the application from the point of view of technological innovation. "It is quite innovative because, generally, recommendation systems are used in the context of e-commerce and we are here using it for sports," said Vivian Félix López.
System based on knowledge
The researchers have analyzed the types of recommendation systems that exist and the majority takes into account aspects such as early adopters’ opinions, but it did not make sense in this case because specific data of each tournament must be attended. The facilities, the time of each competition or the number of participants are some of the relevant aspects for a proper election to be held and automated thanks to the application, so it is considered a "knowledge-based system."
Definitely, with the information which the event organizer introduces, the recommendation system uses an algorithm based on assigning scores to each of the possibilities according to a set of rules and it will show as the recommended option the one which has obtained a better qualification. In the 'app' interface the result will be seen graphically.
Scientists have been working on continuous improvement of the algorithm and will present a new version of this indicator agent and multi-agent system in the '13th Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems', PAAMS'15, a conference on artificial intelligence which is celebrated every year in the month of June in Salamanca.
Utilities for all users
On the sidelines of this aspect of the research, the 'app', designed for the Android operating system and called MASGEDAPP, has many other useful services for competition organizers, for participants and other users who want information about the tournaments.
For example, an agent has been used to locate geographically and offer images of installations that combine data from Google Maps and Open Data Portal of the Junta de Castile and Leon, which include information on sports facilities that exist in the community. Besides, users may receive notifications and specific messages with information about the events, the course of the competition, schedules or possible modifications.