20 | NewScientist | 6 October 2012

TECHNOLOGY

WHEN watching sport on TV, the footage is often only half the fun. A good commentator can make all the difference, peppering a play-by-play account of the action with expert knowledge and anecdotes. But even the best commentator’s repertoire is limited. Now an AI system called Scores could help.

Created by sports fan Greg Lee at the University of Alberta in Canada, Scores can tap into a stash of sporting stories to find relevant anecdotes that a commentator might not have thought of.

The idea came to Lee when he found himself choosing between matches on TV based on the commentary rather than the teams. Good commentators insert stories, he says. “As a viewer I was wanting them to tell me something interesting.” The approach could also provide believable commentary to sports video games.

He and his team initially

in California this month. Tom Rennie, a commentator

and editor at UK radio station talkSPORT, has reservations about an overdependence on historical anecdote. “Too much commentary gets bogged down in stats,” he says. “I prefer it when the focus is on what’s going on.” But he concedes such a system could help with sports that last all day, like cricket or baseball. “When there’s 8 to 10 hours of commentary, stories can make it more interesting.” n

experimented with baseball commentary. During a match in which one team is trailing by four runs in the ninth inning, for example, the system might suggest an anecdote about the Los Angeles Dodgers, who came back to tie a game from the same situation in 2006 by hitting four consecutive home runs.

The system works by matching the features of a live event – such as the teams, key players, the score and the remaining time – against a database of available stories. Once stories that include

some of those features are found it selects the few that are most relevant and suggests them to a human commentator.

The challenge is in evaluating the relevance of candidate stories and ranking them. Lee’s

system uses machine-learning techniques to do this. The most important feature was the teams involved and the second was the difference in number of runs.

To test the system, the researchers used it to create commentary for pre-recorded sports broadcasts and presented them to an audience of 16 volunteers, who said they found the commentary relevant and enjoyable. The team will present the work at the AIIDE conference

Douglas Heaven

Silk smooths path to gadgets that dissolve after useWRAPPING something up in silk isn’t just about luxury: it could give rise to a new breed of electronics that melt away when no longer needed. The idea could lead to environmentally friendly devices, implants that break down naturally in the body, even self-destructing spy cameras.

A team led by John Rogers of the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has created electronic devices with lifespans controlled precisely by an envelope of silk, which is built to degrade at a certain rate.

One test device, a heating circuit powered by beaming radio waves at it, was implanted under the skin of a rat. The idea was to control post-surgical infection by raising the temperature locally if needed, killing bacteria. After the wound healed, the implant simply melted away (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1226325).

The electronics include thin,

“When there’s 8 to 10 hours of sports commentary, anecdotes can make it more interesting”

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This is just like the time when…Software that picks anecdotes for commentators means that the best stories are always to hand

flexible antennas and temperature sensors made from magnesium and silicon. The materials are not toxic, and the amounts used are so small that they can dissolve quickly in liquid environments like the body. A conventional, millimetre-thick chip would take about 1000 years to dissolve, but the tiny amounts of material used in these new devices disappear in about two weeks.

The lifespan of the silk packaging can be controlled by varying its crystalline structure, and thus the degree to which liquids like water can

attack it. This means the silk can disintegrate after just a few minutes, or over months or even years.

Rogers’s group has also made dental implants that measure bacterial levels in the mouth. The combination of silk and silicon has potential beyond healthcare, too: the silk could be used to create biodegradable displays in smartphones, for instance, helping reduce waste. At the request of US military research agency DARPA, which funded the work, the group has even built a tiny, dissolvable digital camera. Hal Hodson n

–They think it’s all over–

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