(upbeat music)
- [Narrator] Across Australian professional sport,
a wide range of technologies are used on and off the field
to collect personal information about athletes.
They range from continuous heart rate, GPS
and video monitoring to menstrual cycle and sleep tracking.
- At the moment we're collecting more data,
I think than we know what to do with.
There is this promise that artificial intelligence
techniques like machine learning
is gonna give us some insights,
but that at the moment is more promised
than delivering on it.
- So professional sport is at the absolute frontier
of human monitoring with every measurable aspect
of athletes' lives constantly tracked.
But we need to ask what are we measuring and why?
And data and machine learning will only ever provide
a reductive pixelated response to those questions.
(upbeat music)
- So athletes by definition are outliers.
They deviate from the mean and they defy prediction.
But why this matters so much for all of us,
whether or not you're a sports fan,
is what we tolerate in terms of human monitoring
on our sporting fields, foreshadows what we'll tolerate
in other workplaces, in public life,
in private life and we must have limits.
- Professor Toby Walsh and Associate Professor
Julia Powles are the co-chairs of the
Australian Academy of Science's discussion paper,
"Getting Ahead of the Game: Athlete Data
in Professional Sport".
Professor Walsh is one of the world's leading researchers
in artificial intelligence
and believes limits should be placed on data collection
in professional sport to avoid exploitation of athletes.
- It used to be that we might collect data
when you were playing a game.
Now we're collecting it during training
and we're even collecting it when you go home,
even when you're asleep.
And of course that raises
some interesting, challenging, legal,
and ethical questions about your privacy
and about what happens to that data
when you're no longer competing.
- Associate Professor Powles is renowned internationally
for her work on the law
and politics of data, automation and AI.
She's spearheading two major national projects
on data in sport
as the Director of the Minderoo Tech
and Policy Lab at the University of Western Australia.
- Data creates this amazing hallucinatory effect.
When people utter the word,
their tendency is to collect, to amass, to aggregate
and to leverage. But when we speak about athletes and data,
we need to be clear about what we're talking about.
We're talking about personal
and often highly sensitive information.
And once this information exists,
everyone wants a piece of it.
Coaches, clubs, but also third-party tech vendors,
broadcasters, betting and wagering agencies.
The best way of managing this information
and ensuring that we protect against unintended consequences
is to be absolutely sure
about what we're collecting in the first place.
- Collecting data on and off the field is now
so common place, that many people are unaware
of how expansive and invasive the practice has become.
- 'Cause we got more and more cheap sensors
so that we can collect this tsunami of data,
not just data about people's position
and motion around the playing pitch,
but also biometric information about their heartbeat,
their blood pressure and all of this information
that now we can collect very easily and very cheaply.
- Now the Australian Academy of Science
and Minderoo Tech and Policy Lab
at the university of Western Australia
are calling for a national conversation
to identify opportunities
for sports data governance in Australia.
- We need to get ahead of the game
and that requires equal parts,
rigorous evidence-based assessments
of what data can and importantly cannot do.
And it takes principled leadership to ensure that athletes
and athlete rights are protected and promoted
both in their own interests and in the public interest.