Joint Colloquium Distinguished Lecture Series


Technology is Making Better Athletes While Enhancing the Fan Experience

Wednesday, February 24, 2010
306 Soda Hall (HP Auditorium)
4:00 - 5:00 pm

Ken Milnes
Sr. Vice President of Engineering, Sportvision

Downloadable pdf

Abstract:

Technology is improving how athletes train and how fans experience sports.   Modern technology is used to track baseballs, players, and race cars.  Athletes gain insight into details of their performance and fans can gain additional enjoyment in their sport.   All of the major league baseball pitches are being tracked by a machine vision based system. The pitch speed, break, release point, and final pitch location are measured.   The athletes see their consistency and trends.   The fans get better visualizations of the pitch.

Biography

Ken Milnes is responsible for managing research and development and product development at Sportvision. Ken was the lead system engineer for Sportvision’s Emmy-award winning RACEf/x motorsports broadcast enhancement system, and he has developed systems to measure baseball bat swing speed and golf club speed.

Prior to Sportvision, Ken was Vice President of Engineering at StarSight/Gemstar where he led the development of electronic program guides and managed the development of high volume consumer electronic set top box products. He was also a co-founder and Director of Product Management at Etak, a digital mapping company. Ken has background in software development, hardware development, and RF engineering.

Ken holds over 10 US and foreign patents and has been honored with four Emmy Awards for his work at Sportvision on broadcast and advanced media platforms. He has a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

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