Mohamad Noor-Chowdhury

Interesting topic Mohamad! I never would have imagined loT to be associated in the sports industry, in so many various segments, heath, performance and fan base. It just goes to show how far this has come and is going. .
Health concerns have been a major topic and controversy as it relates to sports injuries, specifically head injuries (concussions), looks like we headed (no pun intended) in the right direction, as it relates to monitoring and analyzing these injuries based on loT.

Very cool topic Mohamad. And great questions at the end. This makes me think about my decision to watch most sports on TV because I have a better view of the game, but mostly because the overall experience at the stadiums in my area is extremely lacking the connection to its fans through technology. Another issue I had in the past was stadiums would get rebuilt and the best seats that were up front on the second level have now been replaced with corporate boxes. They now get the best seats in the house. So if the stadium doesn’t have great seats (for a reasonable price) and they also don’t have an upgraded stadium with IoT integrations, then the experience is greatly lacking.

Great post Mohamad! My dad is big into sports – football and soccer are always on rotation, but my dad also stays in touch with baseball and hockey from time to time. As a kid I’ve watched professional sports welcome technology with open arms and now the fan dynamic is so different from what it was 20 years ago. Now, you can find that each professional football team has a social media profile and tries to ignite customer excitement through screen-grabs and gifs of certain plays throughout the season. As per your point in how sometimes stadiums feel there’s a lacking of IoT integration – I can certainly feel that from lower division stadiums that I’ve been to throughout the years. The lack of free wifi can be quite annoying, especially if fans want to post on social media their experience at the ball game.
Another important aspect to the stadium experience is seats! As Joel had mentioned, with stadiums rebuilding sometimes the seat experience becomes entirely different. Although generally people would consider this a good thing, some newer stadiums really are not my favorite because of the seat plan – Barclay Center 2nd level is certainly one of them. Too steep, not enough leg room, and honestly anxiety inducing once you’re up there.

I like the idea you bring up of coaches being able to analyze videos. I would take it one step further. Combining the IoT with AI to make game time recommendations to coachs. All the different cameras around the stadium, and maybe even individual team drones, feeding into a single AI powered system. This AI would analyze player performance to ID who is at there best, and how is struggling. It would be a huge investment by the team to develop and implement this system, but I think it would give a team a huge advantage.

However, I disagree with you about older stadiums. I guess I am getting to that age where I like things the way they where. There is something relaxing about going to a baseball game in an old stadium and disconnecting, watching it free of distractions. The smell of the grass, the sound of the crowd (different in person), the sound of the game (VERY different in person). Call me old fashion, but I like my baseball games with peanuts and crackerjacks, not blue screens and LEDs.

I’m not a big sports person, but I do enjoy going to a game from time to time. Hockey is my favorite thing to see live (to me, watching it on a screen is boring). What I find objectionable is how expensive tickets are. The prices are insane. I’ll set that element aside for a second, though, to say that being at a game/match is something worth experiencing. This is making me think of the presentation that Bart gave in one of our MIS meetups; where he presented what his company (SalesForce) was doing to make the Allianz Arena in Munich as “smart” stadium. I felt like one of the biggest plusses was the ability to help control traffic in and out of the stadium as well as parking. The hassle of those things – I would think – might be something that would keep people from going to a game (and it also makes things hellish for people who aren’t attending but need to be in the area). That alone would be — forgive the pun – a game-changer!

Mo, this is is such a great topic, and I can think of multiple ways that could teach the importance of money to children, especially minority children and even adults. I didn’t know about generational wealth, stocks, investments, bonds, even savings and having money set aside until my early twenties. Teaching courses starting in middle school is one way I think could teach this topic early. Having people who are starting their careers in early education take a course in this topics in order to properly education their students. Something that I would love to see, cartoons that taught in a creative way the fundamentals of wealth and savings. Love this topic, as there many avenues we can take to implement this,

I think you are right on with need to teach more live skills at schools. On of my favorite units (not even a full class) was when my teacher had us spend 3 weeks doing paper stock trading. It was a great learning experience and got me interested in the stoke market in high school. You talk about math. It gave me the idea that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. If you use finances as a way to teach math I think it would be a win-win. Students would retain the lessons more because of the practical aspect of the teaching method, and they would learn about our finances work to be better prepared when they are part of it.

I love the graph you included and those numbers definitely put things into perspective! I remember senior year in high school we had an economy class that was a requirement where we learned things like how to write a check, balance a checkbook, and other basic principles. I think it is possible to start this even earlier on as well as it’s very important to teach life skills because like many of us say in school, “when am I ever going to need this again?”

Social media has been a positive impact on how people emotionally and mentally respond to COVID. However, I think it is also the match to a lot of the civil unrest we are seeing. The issues at causing so much unrest throughout the country have been around long before social media and COVID, and not getting any better over time. The high number of unemployed people listing to their echo chambers on social media was the spark to light everything. I just hope social media can be just as helpful putting everything back together once we have reached a positive outcome.

I think social media during the pandemic and when everyone was in quaratine for those few months, was an escape from reality. It helped connecting with others virtually when being physically in contact witth people was not sociall acceptable at the time. Even though it has helped positiviely for people, I believe it has also negatively affected people mentally. I know I personally have taken social media breaks for periods of time because it’s just too time consuming and I felt like I was wasting my day away starring at my phone for hours becoming less productive. As mentioned in the Netflix documentary ‘Social Dilemma,’ social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook have created an algorigthm where the scrolling is continous with no end, and everytime one refreshes their feed, a new post pops up a he type to restart the curousity to contine to scroll. So to answer your question I think social media can help positively short term, but long term the consant time spent on social media will have a negaive impact on people mentally.

Both are interesting topics which seem taboo these days. Having social media accounts it wasn’t until recently I was made aware of how harmful these sites can be, just like any form of addiction, user frequency and type are controlled by the user, however many of us do not consider this type of activity an addiction.

I always revert back to the pre-social media days, when I was limited with my daily interactions with friends, if I wanted to know what someone looked like, I would either have to wait until I ran into them somewhere, and hearing from an old friend/associate out of the blue was special. Though I think social media is a great platform for communication and can be used in a positive way, such as finding an old friend, connecting to other users in a group page with similar interests. I also feel that these positive tactics existed prior in other communication methods, it just may take longer and harder to find that old friend than typing their name in the search bar and have them appear.