BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to investigate the association between MCT1 rs1049434 polymorphism and indirect muscle injuries in elite football players. One hundred and seventy-three male elite Italian football players (age = 19.2 ± 5.3 years) were recruited from a first-league football club participating at the Official National Italian Football Championship (Serie A, Primavera, Allievi...

The RoboCup competition aims at advancing AI and robotics via a series of robotic competitions, involving soccer, rescue and other competitive scenarios, carried out in various leagues featuring different types of (often autonomous) robots. Poised between theoretical AI research, engineering, useful applications and providing a universal benchmark, in RoboCup 2009 one could witness again increa...

Objective We aimed to explore the validity of applying current reference ranges of the enzyme creatine kinase (CK) when analysing the medical status of professional footballers and to offer a more functional CK reference range for professional footballers. Methods A sample of 27 professional male footballers competing in The Football League Championship was analysed. The single sample Wilcoxo...

Background Working effectively in teams is an important 21st century skill as well as a fundamental component of the ABET professional competencies. However, successful teamwork is challenging, and empirical studies with adolescents concerning how the collaboration quality of team members is related to team performance are limited. Purpose/Hypothesis This study investigated the relationship bet...

In order to achieve long-term autonomy in the real world, fully autonomous agents need to be able to learn, both to improve their behaviors in a complex, dynamically changing world, and to enable interaction with previously unfamiliar agents. This talk begins by presenting layered learning, a hierarchical machine learning paradigm that enables learning of complex behaviors by incrementally lear...

The aim of the present study was to determine the between-match variability in soccer referees' match performances. 1 269 individual match observations were undertaken on 59 referees (range 2-79 games per referee) officiating in the English Premier League and Championship from 2003/2004 to 2007/2008 using a computerised tracking system (Prozone (®), Leeds, England). Between-match coefficients o...

opportunity for integrated robotics research. In particular, robot players in a soccer game must recognize and track objects in real time, navigate in a dynamic field, collaborate with teammates, and strike the ball in the correct direction. All these tasks demand robots that are autonomous (sensing, thinking, and acting as independent creatures), efficient (functioning under time and resource ...

Middle-sized robot soccer competition provides an excellent opportunity for distributed robotic systems. In particular, a team of dog-sized robot players must perform real-time visual recognition, navigate in a dynamic field, track moving objects, collaborate with teammates, and hit a FIFA size-4 ball in the correct direction. All these tasks demand integrated robots that are autonomous (on-boa...

Robot soccer competition provides an excellent opportunity for robotics research. In particular, robot players in a soccer game must perform real-time visual recognition, navigate in a dynamic field, track moving objects, collaborate with teammates, and hit the ball in the correct direction. All these tasks demand robots that are autonomous (sensing, thinking, and acting as independent creature...

The purpose of this study was to follow-up the variation of pro-/antioxidant status throughout a whole season in elite professional soccer players from the French league (n=19, 18.3±0.6 years) and to examine a possible link between these variations and training load. 5 time points (T1, T2, T3, T4, T5) were proposed to surround crucial periods of training during the whole season: the pre-season ...