Athletes Mollie Brewer and Kevin Childs know high performance is more than sprints and straight-aways. Brewer is an accomplished cyclist who now assists cycling teams. Childs was a collegiate swimmer who now competes in triathlons.
Both are University of Florida Ph.D. engineering students and key players in a closely watched, $2.5-million UF Strategic Funding Initiative: the UF & Sport Collaborative, a multi-disciplinary undertaking, launched by UF President Ben Sasse, which includes exploration of how AI data can enhance athletics.
Known as the AI-Powered Athletics project, this partnership between the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and the University Athletic Association (UAA) will delve deep into wearables such as fitness trackers and other sensors attached to student athletes to provide information for AI databases. Funded projects from this effort may generate pilot data and initial publications that lead to large-scale research proposals for federal agencies.
As graduate research assistants, Brewer and Childs are looking into how performance data is perceived, utilized, and implemented into UF’s athletics programs, noted Spencer Thomas, director of Sports Performance and Analytics with the UAA.
“Data is the future,” Childs said. “If you want to improve performance, you are going to start getting metrics, having more data-driven approaches toward training. We need to make sure we are doing it carefully and precisely.”
Brewer added, “Part of getting into athletics is speaking the language of the coaches and earning their trust. It helps that Kevin and I have a background in athletics. But I have the perspective of working as performance staff and a coach.”
So just who are these Gator graduate students on the cusp of AI?
“Mollie and Kevin are extraordinary students with great backgrounds in collegiate and Olympic-level sports,” Thomas said.
They are many things, really. They are athletes. They are disciplined competitors who, to their surprise, ended up on the research side of sports. And they are Gators carefully dissecting world-changing technology in areas where the surface has barely been scratched.
“They bring a lot to the table with their experience as athletes. I am continuously impressed by the insights, ideas, and enthusiasm they bring to the project,” noted Jennifer Nichols, Ph.D., the biomedical professor helping lead the initiative. “Mollie and Kevin are fantastic.”