So I'm Guillaume Barbier. I will present a joint work by Alberto Batistello, Jean-Sébastien Coron, Emmanuel Prouf, and Rina Zitoun, which tackles the issue of horizontal side channel attacks on the Ishae Saeba-Gnar masking scheme. So the agenda of the presentation is this. So first I will start by sitting the context of the application of their attack. I will describe briefly the first attempt they made and then an improvement of this attack, which renders it quite more efficient. Then I will describe some practical experiments they have led. And finally, introduce the control measure they propose to support this kind of attack. So first, the application. Well, I believe everybody here knows that an implementation of a crypto algorithm on an embedded system is prone to side channel attacks. And that towards such attacks, you will need to add some control measures. And one quite obvious control measure in this case is masking with random values. So we are dealing here with the case of higher order masking. So we will consider that the secret, the sensitive value X will be split among n plus 1 shares, which are both randomly. And the remainder of the algorithm will manipulate those random shares. In recent papers, it has been shown that a sufficient condition to support an attack, side channel attack on such value is to ensure to split the sensitive value among a sufficient number of shares, which should follow this route, with the sigma here being the standard deviation of the measurements that are taken when observing the algorithm execution. So the question the authors want to tackle is what happened when the number of shares grows? And can this be a security issue in the end when it grows too much? So more precisely, they tackle the issue, the problem of secure multiplication. So this is the case where you want to multiply two values that are represented by each by n plus 1 random shares. And you want a process that will output n plus 1 shares that recombine will lead to the product of X time Y. So one nice way to achieve this is to use the Isha'i-Sa'i Wagner scheme from crypto 2003, which has been extended by Rivenproof in 2010, RHS, on multiplication of a GF2 to the K for any K. So this algorithm goes as follows. In the end, you will draw random values that you will use to manipulate each small product of the Xi times the Yj. This is used to build a matrix that is represented here. And then you can recombine all the lines of the matrix to output the n plus 1 shares that could be used to form the result of the multiplication X time Y. So let's go for the attack. So what the authors remarked is that in this algorithm, each value of Xi times Yj is manipulated once. But each value of each Xi and each Yj is manipulated n times. n plus 1 times actually if I continue with the same notation. You can see here that Y1 is manipulated in this product, in this product, and in this product. So this is the case where n plus 1 equals 3. So the idea is to take advantage of this. So what we observe when we take the side channel leakage, when the algorithm is executed, is a different leakage depending on each value. So we will consider a standard I mean white model with a Gaussian noise. And you will see that we have a leakage depending on the value of Xi, a leakage depending on the value of Yj, and a leakage depending on the value of Xi times Yj. You can remark here that the standard deviation of the Gaussian noise here, noted here, is different in both cases. This directly comes from the fact that we can observe n manipulation of Xi and n manipulation of Yj. So by averaging this observation, we can reduce the effect of the noise. So in the end, the intuition for the attack is that when you observe, when the share you want to retrieve is 0, you will see, as I put, always 0 when you observe the result of the multiplication. And if the share is equal to 1, you will observe the same value for the multiplication than the one you observe for Yj. And this can be retrieved in the leakage you analyze. So the authors think that should be a nice trick to manage to distinguish whether Xi is equal to 1 or to 0. So the attack principle is really a template attack indeed. So you have two phases. In the first phase, you will take the measurement and build the templates relative to the manipulation of each value, of each sensitive variable, each share actually. And in a second time, you will try to use the template you built in the first step and the leakage you observe in the attack step to find the value of the share you're trying to find. So the question is raised now is, how do you find Xi? So from the template you built in the first phase and the leakage you observe manipulated the value of Li, you can build the probability density function of the leakage Li for the different values of Xi. And then for each Yj, you can do the same for the share Yj. And you can also do the same for the product Xi times Yj. So in the end, you got three different probability density functions for the Xi for all the Yj and for all the products Xi times Yj, which can be retrieved in the relative to the leakage you have observed in the three cases. Yes, and from the probability density function of Lj and Lij relative to the manipulation of Yj and Xi times Yj, you can retrieve the joint probability density function of observing Lj and Lij knowing that Xi is equal to a certain value. So in the end, if you can retrieve the density function relative to observing all the leakage for one Li and all the Lj and Lij relative to this Li, which we can compute like this. This is more formally the algorithm for the attack, but this quite says the same as the previous slides. So finally, you will consider, as the good hypothesis for the secret share, the value that maximizes the probability of the function we have just seen. So in numerical simulations, this gives the following figures. So you can see that depending on sigma, we express here the number of shares that is required to find the share with a probability over then one half. So we can see that even when there is no noise, we need to have 12 shares to be able to find back, to find each sensitive share with a good probability. And when the noise is one, which is maybe not quite much, we already need 284 shares to be able to find back the sensitive shares. So this gives the trend of the evolution of the number of shares required, depending on the noise. You can see that we are several hundreds of shares to get some good probabilities of retrieving all the shares of the secret. So these figures seem quite high. So the authors, they try to improve this attack. And actually, what they do is they thought, well, we find the probability density function for each xi in the first step. Why not reuse these results to repeat the attack, but on the y side? So using the trying to find the probability density function for the y in the first step, then to repeat this again, and again, and again until either the probability is converged or a given number of iterations is achieved. And actually, that gave quite good results. As we can see here, that we are now, I forget to say, the previous slide was for the case k equals 4. And the results here are shown for both case k equals 4 and k equals 8. And we can see that from the 284 of the previous case, we are now down to 21 or 25, depending on the case. And the number of shares here required to achieve some good success rate is now down to maybe 100 or 50, even in some cases. So back to the initial question. The question was what happens when n becomes greater than this bound here? And well, the answer to this is related to the value of n that is required for the attack to work. So essentially, the attack is a second order attack because we use the value yj n xi times yj. It has been shown that the value n to be able to mount this attack should be of the order of the variance of the product, of the variance of the two ligatures, the two ligatures that are used. And in our case, this goes to sigma squared, the sigma we use in the first place, just because of the square root of n factor divisor we have seen in the beginning. So that tells us that if n is greater than sigma squared times the constant, then our attack should be working. The attack should be working. So we get to this condition, and we notice that we still have a gap in between those two figures. Anyway, I will go to the practical experiments. So they took the measurements on an 80 mega 328p processor. And this is relative to a move operation of a given value into a specific register. And we can see on the figures the different ligatures that have been observed, the SNR of the SNR here. And we can see that we can spot some quite interesting points of interest. This is the curves representing the variance for each value of x. And this is a zoom of the figures here of the older signals around the point of interest that we can see. And this has been achieved by using 200,000 observations. So one thing that has been quite interesting to learn about the leakage of the components they were using is that they have been averaging the signals that we have seen here for the different values of amine weight of the value x that was used. And we can see that the leakage we observe here is really, really correlated to the amine weight of the value. We can really see nine different points with the amine weight of 8 on the top and the amine weight of 0 on the bottom. So then only the first version of the attack is presented here. So that was the one with the 284 shares required. And actually, it works pretty much better in reality. As we can see that even on 10 shares, around 10 shares, the average position of the correct share is really good compared to the other possibilities. And if you consider, in addition to this, the possibility to use an adaptation of a key enumeration algorithm, this should really do the work. And in comparison with the numerical experiments, we can see that we were up to 21 when sigma equal to 1 for the numerical experiments. And that the experimental value we obtain is more close to 10 for a standard deviation value that is way greater than the simulated ones. So one idea of the authors to explain this difference is that the numerical experiments only use one point, whereas the practical experiments use 11 points of interest. So maybe this information may improve the results. So to face this attack, they propose a countermeasure. So going back to the first algorithm for the second multiplication, we can split the algorithm in two. And in the first phase, we can see that we compute the matrix that is used with all the products of the x-item, y-j. In the second step, we introduce some randomness, and we compute the final matrix with the products and the x-alls with the random values. The problem comes from the fact that there is no randomness at this step. And so they just add some source of random in this algorithm with splitting the input into two blocks and to recursively execute the matrix multiplication with adding some mass refreshing all along the way. So in the end, we can see that every single value here manipulated during the algorithm is only manipulated twice under the same mask. So we can see here that y1 and y1 here is manipulated with the same mask, whereas on the other time, the mask is different. So there should not be any relation between them. So to conclude, this paper presents an horizontal side channel attack on the Ishae-Saïv-Agner adaptation by Brevenproof for second multiplication. So the first attempt was not really efficient, but the improved attack gives quite good results. The experiment has been led with success. And we learned from this that when the order n of the sharing becomes too important, then this might not be really good for the security, actually. In the paper, they provide a proof of security of the new countermeasure, but only against n probes. And they want to do that for the case of n square probes, which the case with n probes was the case for the countermeasure of the attack, actually, to study what happens when n lies between the two bonds we've seen, and to improve the efficiency of the countermeasure, and actually that has been done already with some respect, and you can see the results on the e-print version of the article. That's it. Thank you for your attention.


Hello and welcome once again to the official AFC Bournemouth podcast, the unique insight into life behind the scenes at the Cherries, where we aim to bring parts of the club to life for you by talking to some of the key figures. Once again, alongside myself, Chris Temple is club journalist, the man behind a lot of the terrific written pieces on the club's media channels, Neil Peret. Neil, good day to you. Good day to you, Chris. Looking forward to this one. Yeah, today now we're going to be talking perfectly honed athletes, optimum nutrition, things that you and I haven't exactly followed through our careers. That's a bit unfair, Chris. I run to the pub most nights and sprint back from the Chippy as well. Well, we should add before we start that with current Covid safety guidelines in mind, we're recording this episode virtually, all sat behind our laptops in different locations. Well, in this series so far, we've spoken to technical director Richard Hughes, Dutch winger Arnaut Danjuma and January signing Jack Wilscher. If you haven't yet heard those, then do pop back through our catalogue and enjoy. Well, today in episode four, we spin the wheel again and take you into the science behind AFC Bournemouth with one of our longest serving members of first team staff. Now, our guest started his career in football at Manchester City before joining Rochdale. He then swapped Scotland for the South Coast, joining the cherries in 2012 under Paul Groves. It's a very warm welcome to the podcast to the club's head of sports science, Dan Hodges. Thank you, Chris. Thanks, Neil. Looking forward to it. Now, Dan, it's great to have you. Let's first of all flesh out some of those career bullet points for us. Talk us through your journey in football to where we sit here today. Yes, I started my undergraduate journey at Brunel University in London. As I got through the end of my first year, I realised I was no longer going to be a professional footballer, unfortunately. So I thought, right, how can I get myself in there and actually work within elite football? So no, I'm serious now. I had a big interest in the performance side of football, obviously, and wanted to be a part of it. So I completed my undergraduate and towards the back end of my third year, I managed to get in touch with the head of sports science at Manchester City at the time, so Damien Rodin. We actually had a meeting whilst I was in the midst of sitting my final exams. I think Man City were playing spurs away. So I went across London to a hotel and met him for breakfast. And obviously, being a bit starstruck at the time, there was lots of Man City players around the place and I was a bit in awe of it. But hopefully, well, must have come across well and managed to secure an internship. It was initially to help them out with the following pre-season for the six weeks.  That was kind of a long side, working with the 21s at the EDS, Elite Development Squad at the time, and helping out with the first team as well. So it was very good. It was, you know, it was a very good grounding for me. Some say, you know, a very luxurious grounding to go from nothing to Manchester City. But I learned from some amazing people there and obviously from there went to Rochdale, which was probably at the other end of the spectrum. But equally, equally is important. And then obviously, you make the move to the Cherries in 2012. And of course, you've been a Premier League club. But talk us through the club, I guess, as it was made up when you joined in 2012, because presumably back then, what, eight, nine years ago, sports science was still pretty evolutionary at a Bournemouth level. Yeah, definitely. I came from Rochdale, like I said, and that, you know, there had been a fitness coach who performed me, who was very good and everyone spoke really highly of. So then I came down here and there was already a really good gym in place. There was the infrastructure. The pitches were not quite there yet, where we trained now on the Pavilion side of it. But they were just growing through. So we did a preseason at Camford and then ended up coming to the training pitches here as the season got underway. It was really good, really exciting. I was a little bit nervous at the time, obviously coming down from Manchester. But it was nothing too new as I obviously went from London to Manchester in the first place. I had an interview with Paul and I managed to get the job title of head of sports science, even though I was head of no one apart from myself. Thought head on that side, luckily, and obviously kept that kept that title all the way through. So Paul employed me with Sean Brooks, Garve came in at the same time as me, Garvin Stewart, who's still here now, our head analyst. And it was yeah, it was really good that you could see the club was no disrespect to Rochedale. But the club here was was geared up to go further. They were spending a little bit more money on the infrastructure. The playing squad was was better. And they wanted to get up through the leagues, which was, you know, really important from my side of things as well. And I was excited to start. You just give me an idea actually to get myself head of commentary as my new title, even though I'm the only one.  Because I think it's fair to say you've the roller coaster has probably done a full full circle if you like in those eight years. Yeah, it was an absolute whirlwind to start off with. Didn't we didn't start the season too well, which ultimately led to the, you know, the, the leaving of Sean and Paul. And I was very, very nervous when I heard that Eddie Howe was coming back. I knew that he had taken a previous fitness coach with him to Burnley. So I was, you know, I was fully expecting to be to be let go. And I was thinking, you know, where do I go from here really? But luckily enough, I got a chance. And, you know, I'd like to say I took it at that time. And that season was was a whirlwind. You know, we were in the bottom half, or I think we're in the bottom three, actually, when Eddie Howe came in, Eddie Howe and JT. And, and then we, we things changed all of a sudden and everyone started looking up, obviously promoted that season. And then in the championship, it was, it was great. I was, you know, I'd set my goal early on to kind of get to the championship as a lead fitness coach as a head of sports science. And I was really excited to get there and test my wit up against some of the guys that I knew were in that league from my side of things. And then the club went from strength to strength, we were fully, fully supported by everyone at the board. And that's from from the manager to the assistant manager to the chief executive. Everyone was was kind of, you know, if we if we could justify why we needed, you know, a certain bits of equipment or what we were doing a certain test for, etc. Then it was it was fully funded and backed in that respect. And we were very lucky. So things progress very quickly in terms of our facilities infrastructure from the sports science and medical side. Well, come on a bit later to the differences as you've got up the divisions in terms of that your day to day, I guess, but let's let's go right back to the start. Let's strip this back because a lot of people won't actually know exactly what to make up your department. It started with just you but tell us now what your department is personnel wise, who's there and what their roles are? Yeah, it started with me and grew infinitely. To be honest with you, I took on an intern, Ben Donakie, who worked worked with me and he was working. He was working here till two o'clock and then he'd go and work at the bank because we weren't paying him as an intern here and then he'd come back the next day and worked till two. It's a little bit frustrating, actually, because I ended up cleaning up all the bottles and everything myself, which I didn't want to be doing at that time. No, but he at the end of that season, when we got promoted to the championship, he was taken on full time and fully earned that. Ben was pretty much on the whole journey with me and I can't speak highly enough of Ben. He then turned into our strength coach and looked after the gym side of things. Obviously, I was overseeing everything, but he was leading that. Ben was there. We had various interns as well. Then Phil Keane, he started as an intern. He's now working with the first team. We hired him. He worked with Perch when Perch was with the 21s. He was his lead fitness coach. Everyone knows Phil. He's a very popular guy around here. He worked extremely hard. He's been with the 21s for about five years, turned into a full-time role and now he's been promoted and up with the first team and fully deserved and really earning his stripes up with the first team and respect of the players and managers. Ben, it was Ben. It was Phil. I've got Rob Lloyd, who again interned with us as a placement student. He was from Loughborough University.  He went to Leicester for a year. Whilst that happened, and then in the meantime, I managed to get a little bit more budget and brought him back. He's now one of our first team sports scientists. He looks after a lot of the data in the gym. A lot of our testing, our jump testing. He does on-field rehab and he's a real key member of our team. One I've probably missed out is Sean McCullough. Sean is our data, how would I describe him? His job title is first team sports scientist again, but he deals with all our data, all our data-basing, all of our crunching numbers. I definitely couldn't be without Sean. I actually met him at the end of our first year in the Premier League, I think. He came over as part of our GPS company and he was our contact there. He showed me some bits and pieces that he was doing on the side. I was like, wow, I want you in this department, you're going to make this department better. I spoke with the then manager at the time, Eddie Howe. He fully supported it and we managed to get him on board as well. That's my team at the minute. There's been some staff that have come on going in the meantime. Ultimately, it's myself, Phil Keane, Rob Lloyd and Sean McCullough at the moment. Dan, you spoke earlier about the differences between Bournemouth and Rochdale, but what about the differences between going from Manchester City to Rochdale? What was that like for you? Yeah, at Manchester City, you want for nothing. I actually started just at the end of their buyout when the shake took over, so things went exponential from there and exponential growth in terms of staff and facilities, etc. I'm really lucky to work there. When I went to Rochdale with Steve Eyre, who gave me my first opportunity to lead the department and be a first team fitness coach, it was certainly an eye-opener. We didn't initially have a training ground, so it was scratching around every day to figure out where we're going to train. We had no real equipment in terms of poles, etc., and the monitoring side of things was difficult in terms of heart rate GPS. They did have a heart rate monitoring system, which I used, but GPS, no. But it was a club where, very similar to here, but on a smaller scale, where everyone wanted you to do well. Everyone was living and breathing the club and I kind of just got my head down and really worked hard and supported them as best I could. That gave me such good grounding in terms of having to be transitional on the job, or I think one of the times, so it might be seen as a negative, really, but I worked there for one season and Steve Eyre, who employed me, unfortunately, lost his job in the December of that year, then took Chris Beach, who was the youth team manager who took over. He got the job for, I think, two months and the results didn't really improve. Then John Coleman and Jimmy Bell came in from from Akrinton Stanley and they took it through until the end of the season, so it was three different spells, three different managers, very different, but again that gave me a very good grounding in terms of my personal relationships, how I dealt with them, how I dealt with the players, etc. But yeah, really thinking on your feet, I think one of the times, one of the managers, I can't remember who it was, but they got caught in traffic or an accident or something and I ended up taking the whole of the training session, which at the time I was like, wow, what's going on here, what do I do? But you know, the lads are on board and I managed to wing my way through that session, but you know, those kind of experiences really shape you for the future, I think. Rochdale's renowned for its meat and potato pies as well, Dan, did you get stuck into them? Neil, that is not me, unfortunately, I am aware of the nutritional side of the value of things, so I stayed well away. Listen, you've been on the journey, like you said, from the depths of League 1 to the Premier League here and is it like a player's sort of mentality? Are you similarly competitive with your rival in sports science as you come through the leagues, you sort of touched on it earlier? Yeah, it's not really spoken about, obviously, but people, the thing about sports science and especially in football is no one's really doing anything that different to each other, if you know what I mean, so obviously managers have different philosophies and different training methods, etc. And that has a big influence on things, but in terms of recovery, nutrition, invariably people are kind of doing very similar things. My very best friend, Ali Harris, is head of performance at Fulham now and he started at Fulham as I started at Man City, or I think a year after as an intern and kind of worked his way up. So he was one of the best men at my wedding.  So we band to back and forth and there's kind of an underlying rivalry, of course, but we want the best for each other. But what I'm saying is we're able to speak sharp and and see what what we're doing. And although there is a slight rivalry there, it's always good to kind of compete against each other. And that actually happened once actually when he was head of performance when they had their first year in the Premier League. So before this one, the last time in there in the Premier League. And that was just a it was a great, great day for me, my family, his family all there. And it was a really good day and we won as well, which is brilliant. Dan, I've got to say, when I sort of go back to the early 90s when I first started covering the club, which was probably long before you were born, but not Chris, perhaps. Sports science, it was almost unheard of in those days here. We had someone like Sean O'Driscoll, who was playing physiotherapist, youth team manager, and he was probably driving the team bus as well. And that was all in all in one. Dan, how it's just evolved so quickly, has it not? Yeah, it definitely has, Neil. You know, from from the facilities that we have to the equipment we use. And and yeah, but ultimately, I think you, we always have to remember sports science sometimes has a bad rap for putting blocks on players. And, you know, you can't do this, we can't do that. But, you know, we're there to to kind of help guide the manager in and make him or help him think about things that maybe he didn't think about in the past. So under no circumstance would I be saying, no, no, no, don't do this, do this, do this, or likewise take any credit for any success, any wins or anything the team have had any fitness things the team have had. I don't think that that's part of it. You're there to kind of guide the process and help help become an expert in the side of things that you're responsible for. I think that's important to get across. Talking about responsible, what is your remit and what are your responsibilities Dan? So ultimately responsible for the for the fitness of the team, I think that obviously delves into a different categories in terms of recovery, nutrition, you know, the strength side of things, monitoring on a daily basis. So it's really putting training plans in or helping the manager and the coaching staff to put training plans in place and provide little recommendations based on the physical side of things on the physical element of players individually and collectively as a team, putting those in place and helping, like I said earlier guide guide the manager in terms of, you know, what, what from a physical perspective, what should things look like, what should this day look like, what should this training session look like from a, from a, yeah, say again a physical perspective. So responsible for, yeah, recovery, nutrition, although I would not claim to be any sort of expert in nutrition. We lean on other experts and use their guidance. Interestingly, at the minute we're using Royce Wiggins. So Royce retired from playing and worked extremely hard is now doing his masters in nutrition. He's got his diploma in nutrition as well. And he is, you know, he is well read and really into it at the minute. So we're closely linked and he's helping, helping the department on that side. Just coming in on there about another ex player who perhaps people don't know as well as Royce Wiggins, Alex Parsons, has he got some in, or has he had some involvement before? Yeah, Alex at the end of mid-season last year, he's been doing a course or qualification, an exos qualification, which is a strength and conditioning company in the USA. And he's coming with that. He's worked with a couple of players individually. We had some good feedback just in terms of helping their movement and how they, you know, how they execute certain actions on the pitch.  I think he really had a big benefit at the end of last season. Unfortunately, COVID, COVID strikes. So he hasn't been in since, but I know that he sees a couple of our boys on Zoom, on Zoom meetings, which is good. You spoke about training there, Dan, just run us through a typical day's training for you personally. Yeah, so my day would start at quarter past six in the gym for my own benefit. That is my one main hobby. Me and Phil Keane can often be found in there sweating our nuts off at that time. After that, we have a medical and sports science meeting at typically eight AM most days. And that's the plan the day, how it looks like from my side of things, how it looks like from the medical perspective, what injured players are doing, etc. So that that's an important meeting where everyone's on the same page. At that point, myself and Craig Roberts, the doc, will go and see the manager around about Hapa State. And again, the dock or feedback on availability for training, who's who's fit, who's not, who's training. And then I'll stay in a little bit longer and kind of go through the training plan for that day, depending on what we're doing, what physical outcomes we need from that day. And I'll help, you know, give my recommendation on that side of things. And then it's just about planning, planning the day, really, what the warm-up is going to look like, what any conditioning, anything we're doing on the pitch is going to look like. I'll meet with my team and we'll go through that in the morning. Then at around about 10 30, the guys will do pre activation, which is almost like a little training preparation. If you like, you know, different exercises, which will help the guys prepare for what they're going to face on the field. And then they'll come outside about 10 45. I'll lead the first part of the session, the warm-up and make sure that we get the players where they need to be. They will then train. After training, depending on, again, depending on the day, they might go in the gym. We'll oversee that and facilitate their session in there. And then it's all about looking at the data from training. And as I mentioned, Sean, he will go through that. I will then look at it, feed back to the manager and go and meet the manager and perch again in the afternoon and kind of go through what we did in that day and how it looked for the players. You touched on it down a minute ago. Data will come on to a match day and your routine for a match day shortly. But that data you're collecting and that Sean is leading on on analyzing, I guess, tell us how you're picking that data up. What what instruments do you use? We always see the players wearing those little heart rate monitor vests and things. How are you collecting that data? Yeah, so that's a daily increase. And again, like I said earlier, there will be no secrets. Every every football team in the land, every professional football team in the land will now be using those. But they're GPS monitors. So we can track everything the players are doing on the pitch, you know, from an external perspective in terms of distance covered, high speed running, sprints, and then individualize it for themselves, look at their own different thresholds for certain things for different speeds, etc. So that data, as you can imagine, with 20 players on a daily basis for an hour and a half training session, there's there's lots of it, you know, we've accumulated, I think the only season I didn't have it here was at the start of League One, we got it towards the end of League One. So we got all of that data there. They also wear heart rate monitors, which kind of gives us a little bit of feedback internally. So how the players are responding centrally to that training session or to that training stimulus that we're giving them. Again, that data is all collated in databases. So we know our norms for certain days, what we expect from certain players in certain positions. We have all that cataloged and and then can feed all that back. And the same for any drills that we do on the training pitch, we split all the drills, we look at how fullbacks respond, how center midge respond, you know, is that drill replicating the intensity that we're going to get in the game at the weekend. And it's kind of building up all these different libraries. So when we are discussing our training sessions, we know where we're at and roughly what kind of response an individual player is going to get. Just as a brief aside, have you ever stuck a heart rate monitor on a manager during a during a game? No, no, I haven't. That's an interesting topic. No, I haven't. No, I can imagine that be quite high, almost scary in some instances, I think. I can imagine some managers might go off the charts with that one. Now then give us that we've given us an idea of brilliant insight into your training day. Let's imagine it's a home game as you know, you might have in the championship. Well, what's your match day for a three o'clock kickoff on a Saturday afternoon? Yeah, so on a matchday, one of the important things is the players that are left out of the squad. It's really important that they're looked after and they're getting what they need. So when ultimately they are called upon, they're ready to perform. So anyone that's left out of the squad will either work, will work at the training pitch, be at home or away. So that they'll always remain here. And that will be with either myself or Phil, Rob or Sean. So we'll put on a training condition session for those guys in the morning, say about 10 o'clock. For example, they will train and then and then it's about prepping nutritionally for the game really. When it comes to a game, the work is almost done for the training week, if you know what I mean. So we're setting up for the game. We're making sure that players are hydrated. They've got what they need in terms of their drinks individualized. They've got, you know, gels, etc. Caffeine, everything's set up and ready for them. So when they when they report to a game around about half past one for a three o'clock kickoff, then everything's there for them. During the game that there's prep, we have a lot of players that will do individual activation. So they will on a home game, they will they will go across to our gym and in the stand. And one of my guys will facilitate their every need that they need in there. So it might be certain isometric exercises or different bits of preparation they need to perform on the match day as part of their warm up. They'll come back over and then about and about two, let me think I think my time is right. Can't believe I've forgotten we've had so many games this year, it's blurred into one. And so roughly about 25 past two, so 35 minutes before kickoff, the starters will go outside and that's when you'll see me taking the warm up as part of that prep for the game. So they'll do some band work, some activation work on the pitch as a team. And then go through their movement prep, etc. And you'll see everything that we do from that perspective with the with the coaches. During the game, it's just it's just looking at players. So one of the one of the big things in the championship this year, which I probably, we probably missed the boat on last year in the Premier League was having the GPS systems in game. So in the Premier League, we never had that because we used to use a camera based system and get data League wide. So every team we play every player in the league, every game in the league, we had that data physically how players were performing in the championship, we're not as you know, it's not as readily available, should I say, cost wise and things like that. So we now use GPS in games. It took a game or two for players to stop moaning. But they finally come around to it. So yeah, I'll have a live feed there on the iPad next to the bench. Now, I'm not saying that that helps me make any sort of any sort of decisions or any form any information to the manager, but it's good to oversee and look at averages knowing what what players should normally be doing in games, how the team's doing at certain periods of the game. So I'll be watching that and also looking out subjectively looking out my eye how players are, providing gels, etc. If they need them. Yeah. And then post game is the is the worst part of my job is that is the running for the subs, which they hate as well. I've got to say myself and Neil will have stood at pitch side on a midweek away game somewhere it's lashing down the rain at 10 o'clock at night and the subs coming out to do their running. It does look at one of the worst jobs of being a footballer. Yeah, I look at I've had many a fight with players after games. Just before I let Neil come in down just a quick one there on analyzing that data on the bench on the iPad. Does the manager ask you does he say is X knackered or is why struggling or whatever? Yeah, the manager will look for feedback for sure. Just even even I will watch the game in it in a different perspective to them. Perhaps I'm looking more physically there technically tactically and physically by the way, but I'm looking more of a physical perspective. So yeah, managers will often, you know, why is he stopped running? Why is he looking at it, et cetera? Yeah, I get all of that. But it's yeah, it's good to get that, I think. Dan, you mentioned just then about running the subs at the end of a game. Now on recently, we played Millwall and we noticed that the whole Millwall team and all of the subs came out and ran on the pitch. And I know I said to Chris, this is something I've not really seen very much. Is there any idea why they would have done that?  So I think I come out at the end of that when when they're starting team are out, they were just having a little jog and a stretch which which is perfect. You know, it's a good idea. We do it slightly differently. I was a little bit more passive inside. We have ice baths set up and our medical team are there for for post game massages and stuff. And then we look at our mobility and our range of motion stuff on the day after in the day after that. I'm not saying it's wrong or right. It's just just how we do it. So yeah, that's nothing new. And then I think they did have all nine subs out, didn't they? So I will individualize ours depending on where they're at in the week, what they played in the game, how many games they've played, what they need really from a from a physical perspective. So sometimes I'll have all nine subs out. Sometimes some subs might come on at 45 minutes or or 55 minutes. And you know, they perhaps don't need any work after the game in my opinion or at that time. So so yeah, that that's really yeah, the nooks of it. That's that's probably the reason why you mentioned just there down the medical department. I guess the biggest biggest question may be unknown for those of us who aren't quite as insightful in terms of the the crossover between you and the medical department. You've mentioned already at the start that you you meet with Dr. Craig Roberts and the manager on a daily basis in the morning before training. Talk us through that crossover between you and the medical department. How you work together. Sometimes is it difficult? Do you do you have opposing opinions? Because of course, sports medicine, I guess, would be described as the application of the science, isn't it really? Yeah, for sure. Our teams grown massively. You know, when I first come here, it was it was Dave Gardner and Steve Hard. Both are still here by the way. And I enjoy, you know, a really good relationship with both of those guys. The you know, the age old debate of the medical team are the ones kind of pulling back. If you like where as a sports science conditioning team are the ones pushing players harder. So there's always that conflict between us for sure in that respect. But ultimately, I think you have to work together in order to achieve what you want and to get the players where you need them to be. So it might be that, you know, that they have, they know the injury history or more in depth injury history of certain players so that they know how they respond to load, etc. So they might recommend, you know, doing less in this session or missing this session, which is, you know, is always up for discussion. And I think we work quite well in that respect. The other side of it, obviously is the rehab of injured players. So they will initially work with the with the physios and the medical team at the start. And they they will provide their rehabilitation. And then as it gets towards the end, the end of their injury, they will then come with myself or Phil, Rob or Sean on the on the pitch and really will work together to get them conditioned to work where they need to be for the game and to to get back to train and ultimately be fit enough to contribute for the team on a match day. So yeah, we work very closely together. The depart both, like I said earlier, both departments have grown a lot. And which can only be a good thing, you know, this is more, more knowledge in the room, more experience, which can only help us, I think. Dan, I don't think I've ever known a schedule like this season for obvious reasons, particularly the games schedule you hear about Premier League managers complaining that they have to play two games in a week and stuff like that. And I know I asked the manager about that and he said we'd love to be playing two games in a week, sometimes playing three games in eight days and was it nine games in 21 days or something like that just before Christmas. How how does that impact on player recovery and readiness and stuff like that for you? Yeah, as you say, I've never experienced it. We had we had it. The championship schedule is quite relentless as it is, you know, in a normal season, let alone with the added factor of COVID and a shorter season, etc. etc. So yeah, it has been it has been challenging. But once you get into a rhythm, players get into a rhythm of kind of play and recovery and and what we're doing alongside that is kind of monitoring the players. So, you know, a good thing myself and myself, the sports science team and the medical team will come together. Typically on a Monday or a Thursday if we've played Saturday or Tuesday, so a plus two day. When the players report to training, they will all come through a series of tests that we'd run. Just looking at their recovery markers, you know, you hit it on the head or we call it readiness testing. So so looking at different tests that assess their current status, how they've recovered from the game, where they're at in terms of, you know, it might be it might be neuromuscularly. So we look at their hamstring, the hamstring strength. We might look at their their ankle mobility. We take some some blood markers from them and look at the muscle damage that's been created from the from the load of the game. And and as we build those databases and those individual kind of thresholds for players, we know or we have a rough idea of where they should be out or where they're normally at compared, you know, in other games. And then you can look for the for the for the outliers if you like, are they recovered properly? OK, well, he hasn't recovered quite as well here as we thought he might have done. He might get some extra work with the physios or he might not go on the pitch today to do X, Y, Z. And and that's become a really important system for us. I think this season with so many games, we're building up a, you know, a real good library of where players are at and using that to feed back to the manager and hopefully, hopefully, hopefully keep the team as as fit as we possibly can for our for our ultimate game of getting promoted this year. Then it's obvious if a player gets an injury and they can't play. But what about if a player is so exhausted in a previous game and, you know, he's run like covered every blade of grass and stuff like that? Is it your job to advise the manager to say, look, so and so has run put so much effort into one game that it might be an idea that he doesn't start the next game? Does that happen? There's certain recommendations made that that might be, you know, feasible on different days after different games. So so, yeah, like I said, we have the GPS system. We know what players typically do in games. We know what's normal for them, what's high, what's low. And then ultimately, how many games in a row they might have played recovery X, Y, Z. So, yeah, that information is definitely discussed with the medical team and and fed back to the manager. And then, like I said earlier, it is down to the coach and staff, to the manager, to Perch, to then take that information and use it as they will. I'm not saying that the information is bang on. And, you know, if you think that certain players perform the above where he normally does, is he a high risk to injury, potentially? But under no circumstance would you be able to say, yes, definitely, we should do that. I think it's all a kind of guiding process and using the data to inform rather than dictate. Daniel, I guess in terms of players, just popping back to what you said before about readiness and recovery and their players in the current squad, given the schedule they face this season and some of the dodgy pitches they've played on as well elsewhere that you've actually thought, you know what, this is an amazing effort from this player to still be turning out these kind of results. And there's some guys in the squad who, I guess, defy your expectations as a scientist. For sure, for sure. You know, we're seeing them playing games or games in a row that we've never seen them do before. So, you know, it comes down to that creating that robustness. You know, they match fit and they're they're becoming nice and robust in terms of the physical element and how they get through games. And as long as we do what we can to help them recover post-game and in the game, in the time in between games, you know, they're big players and ultimately we need to have our best players on the pitch if we're going to do anything this season. So, we want to do everything we can to help the manager and help these players stay fit and keep playing and impacting our results. And do you as a department and as a head take that as a barometer of how well you're doing if these players are churning out game after game week after week? No, I don't think so. I think, you know, there's been too many instances where you could take it the other way and things have happened where you think, you know, was that my fault or could I have done something to help that? So, I don't think there's there's anything to be gained from from looking at things like that and patting yourself on the back. I don't think that's the kind of business we're in. We're a team and we're kind of real small part of that team to help the team do what we want to do this season. So, no, I don't think so. Stay with the team. Every team, of course, plays differently.  Some people have a high press. Some people are, you know, very, very energetic all over the pitch. How much does a certain style of play of a team fit with the work that you have to put in guys? And sometimes a guy is simply not suited physiologically, I guess, to the kind of the kind of style of play that one team might have. Yeah, that's a good point, Chris. When I met with the manager, he outlined that he wanted to be a high pressing team. He wanted to get after teams. So, yeah, you know, that we need to get them used to be able to tolerate the level of work or the, we call it the worst case scenario that they would experience in a game. So looking at different time periods throughout that game and seeing, you know, what markers they need to be able to hit to be able to do that on the pitch and repeat, repeat that on the pitch to the benefit of the team. You mentioned nutrition a little bit earlier on as well, and you mentioned that you lean on Roy Swiggins quite a bit for advice on that. But just from, I guess, a more general point of view, I mean, we go back to the days of boxes of pizzas being delivered to the team bus, and I'm sure that was budgetary more than more than a lot of other things. But these days, we see the players walking out of the game with a little brown box of sushi or chicken or whatever it is. Just give us an overview on nutrition and I guess how you structure your advice and your guidance to the players. And I guess how good they are at taking it as well. Let me tell you, no matter what you give the players after a game, they will still mow. Since I've been here, when I first come in, you're right, we were using, I think, dominoes delivered to a bus, especially on away games.  We then had a state of going through Nando's so we'd get Nando's delivered to the bus which was a pain in the backside for people like Jimmy Glass, who had to go and collect it. But now we have a chef essay who's very good so he'll cook. We have buses, luckily, that we're able to cook on with ovens and stuff. So in that time, preceding the game, it's important that they have a carbohydrate hit and a protein hit. They're starting to recover them straight away from the muscle damage and the energy expenditure that they've had. So it's trying to find ways that can get that nutrition back into them, the sugars, everything that they need, but also making sure that they do take it. There's no point in putting on a perfect meal if players at the end of the day are going to go, no, I don't want it. So the important thing is to help them to eat. So we put things like milkshakes on the bus after a game and I've been back and forth with it, and the other games are, they have Coke as well just to help replenish those carbohydrates stores and glycogen stores that they've depleted during the game. So it's trying to find little ways that we keep the adherence, but also benefit them physically as well. Unless Domino's want to sponsor this podcast, other pizza places are available, of course, as are other soft drinks and chicken manufacturers. Welcome. BBC heads come on to me there for a second. You mentioned there about the bus and what about an average day on the training ground? So other players come in and have breakfast and then obviously, I know at the moment, COVID protocols mean they can't all eat lunch in the canteen and things as they normally would, but how much of what they eat breakfast and lunch-wise is dictated by you and is dictated by, I guess, maybe the training that you've done that day or which match day, minus one or two, it is of the week? Yeah, so it's working closely with the chef and now we're at a point where our two chefs essay and Paul kind of know what dishes the guys need on a recovery day on a match day plus one or on a match day minus one. They might need to load up minus two. The carbohydrate content would increase so the players can sort of fuel themselves for the game needed. But yeah, initially, initially you sit down with the chefs and our old nutritionist, Matt Lovell, we would sit down and go through green days, red days, a high intensity day, a recovery day, and what foods might benefit players on those days. But then the chefs kind of get to know it and then you give them the guidance and they then play with the dishes and they know feedback from what the players like, what certain players like. So it's good to have that. You're giving them autonomy in terms of what kind of food groups they need but then the freedom to say, why don't you try this or players might like this. Yeah, so it's good. I guess there's probably a greater adherence to everything, isn't there, when things are going well on the pitch? I think of maybe accepting a certain training program or accepting a certain post-match meal or accepting something else. Do you find in your role that, I guess, probably coaches find the same, don't they? The adherence and the willingness to do everything. I'm not suggesting for a second people that I'm professional but just in terms of the banter or the attitude you might get. Yeah, definitely. When a team's more successful or winning games, they're open to more things. Definitely. I think that's in all walks of life, really, isn't it? You're more open if you're happy. I would say that is the case but that being said, our boys are very, very, very professional. I can't speak highly enough of the group and how they apply themselves and outside the training ground. That's testament to how they perform and regularly playing. Dan, I just want to ask you about sleep because I think it was a couple of years ago there was a story came out that one Premier League team took their own mattresses to away games and put them in the hotel that they were staying at overnight and everybody was sort of aghast at that but I would imagine they probably weren't the only one. Now, do we do things like that and what's your view on sleep? Sleep is huge, you know. I can't tell you how important sleep is from preventing disease to making sure you're refreshed for your body to adapt from exercise, et cetera. Sleep is really, really big, really important and that's something the manager here will definitely understand as well so we might adjust training schedules to allow the players to have a little bit more time in bed a little bit more time at home especially post-game, mid-week when they're not back until late or they're not leaving until late. A lot of the guys you'll find they have a lot of caffeine and a lot of adrenaline after the game and they won't sleep until 3-4 in the morning so you really need to think about that and cater for that in the days after the event. In terms of mattresses and stuff yes, we didn't go as far as mattresses but last season we had pillows for players so we linked up with a pillow company a pillow company a mattress company, I don't know what they call them Bed Shop They're called Beds Are Us for going on Chris's way of sponsoring the podcast and they come in and provide an array of pillows for the guys to test briefly at the training ground and then players and staff jumped on it like Fletch, definitely I think he got two they jumped on it and then we would the Sports Science Department the Kitman even security would take we have a head of security, Chris and our chef that goes to the hotel before games so they would take the pillows up with them and get them delivered to each room it's difficult for us to provide that service now with the amount of games we have so players if they want it will take it themselves if not they'll just live in the luxurious hotel pillows that we have Just two quickies about the nutrition or the food side of things Dan you mentioned then that there's a chef that can cook on the coach I mean when I first heard that I thought that was quite remarkable it was almost like you know how does that work what's he got there an oven, a fridge and all this sort of stuff how does that work and then secondly are the players allowed to have treats maybe things that you wouldn't expect a professional athlete to have is that allowed yeah so firstly it's become a lot more difficult since Kobe for the chef because he's got to cook on two buses, bless him but at the back of the... why does he do that, do you have to stop at services and swap over no so he'll he'll stay on the buses as the games going on and that's when he'll kick in and do his bit and cook the food so at the back of the bus there's Mark Waves there's multiple fridges everywhere to store the food we have plates and cutlery and stuff but all that stuff's ready for the players when they get on or some players might not want to eat straight away so they might give it sort of 10-15 minutes and then they'll eat once once they're ready so that side of things is really important like I said earlier in terms of getting what they need to have at that point into them and yeah Neil I said about coax and milkshakes those type of things help get those sugars back into the players and replenish their stores so yes we do do naughty things I think there has been known to be the odd brownie flying around after the game as well but as long as the guys know that that's important post-game and probably not to have during the week every day now we've taken up plenty of your time already to do shorter I guess supporter questions to get through as well before the end let's take a couple of those now shall we one of which comes from Mr. Fern on Twitter who's a PE teacher based out in Poland who says how do you weight the training for players based on the different requirements of their positions on the field and what kind of factors would be in play yeah so that would be where we use the GPS system if we know what our fullbacks are doing or expected to do in a game we would then you know we need to prepare them for that so be that on the training pitch or in pre-season when we're running etc we know that the kind of intensities they need to get to and so we will condition them accordingly so you might see a centre back might not be running as far as a fullback or a centre mid might be running at less speed so to speak as a centre forward who repeatedly sprints so yeah we use all of that and like I said we call it worst case scenario so it's really conditioning those players to be able to cope with the worst periods that they would face in a game physically be that individually or and positionally I've got a supporter question from James McCafferty has Dan's general and football knowledge improved since he was nominated worst staff quiz team member 2014 that was Eddie Hall that was a ridiculous absolutely ridiculous um yes I'm an intelligent guy you know we we don't do many quizzes anymore to be honest with you but I'm sure that I would be right up there if we did the days of Steve Fletcher standing at the front of the bus with a Micah Garner they thankfully oh yeah we don't give him that much airtime because he would never stop talking that's why he's banned from this podcast at the moment we've already got an hour or so a couple of other shorter ones would expect the goalkeeper and the centre backs maybe to be the beasts in the gym but is there a secret weapon or two in the gym somebody who you would look at and think maybe isn't quite shifting the bigger numbers they are in the gym um isn't quite shifting we haven't gym work this season has been difficult to obviously do with the amount of games we've had so it's been really kind of maintenance sessions um so nothing stands out really from this year um last year Nathan Akke was very good very good you know he worked closely with our strength coach Ben Donakie and you know was in a really good place um but then obviously Covid here etc etc so yeah Ian Hensman from Australia has asked a question he's asked about sleep which you've already answered he is also asking your top three meals for nutrition what would they be? it's difficult it depends on the timing really it depends are you looking at recovery are you looking at you know loading for the game depending on what the outcome is or what we're preparing for what about you if you were to choose your top three that you wanted to eat me personally um um my kids favourite meal is salmon rice and broccoli believe it or not um spot the children of a sports scientist or somebody involved in nutrition honestly you wouldn't believe it so yeah that's one of the top dishes in my house and yeah they are also big fans of sushi honestly would you believe it I can't believe I'm saying that live on podcast um Rob on Twitter AFCB Rob says and this is one thing we haven't touched too much on obviously injuries you know a crossover I guess between yourself and the medical department we're seeing a lot of hamstring injuries in football this season with the schedule and after restart with the the schedule and Bournemouth weren't obviously strangers to that either one of the key things that you use to assess a player's likelihood of a muscle injury can you assess a player's likelihood of a muscle injury I think you can do certain things which might you know help condition players or inform you of the status of where they're at currently we try and expose our players to regular Nordics which is an eccentric hamstring exercise um which is you know research is shown to help prevent hamstring injuries we're also big on on max speed and ensuring that players kind of hit their threshold their individual threshold for max speed um sort of every 10 days or so if they don't get it in a game so that that's also an important dose or been shown to be an important dose for preventing those kind of injuries um and like I said that the readiness testing that we do where we look at the hamstring we look at groins and looking at their thresholds how strong are they at that point how well recovered are they from that game all these kind of things kind of help us to inform sorry help to inform us of where players are at and the kind of risks that might come down right at the start of this podcast you spoke about how you knew quite quickly that you weren't going to become a professional footballer I think you said now just obviously when there's an in-house game I know that people like you to be on their side and I certainly heard people in my department say if he's on the opposite side we need to kick him early on just tell us about how how frustrating it was and just tell us a little bit about your career as a footballer yeah I didn't really have a career as a footballer to be honest with you I like every boy in the world played played younger and really into my football my my uncle was actually a professional footballer Glen Hodges so football was a really big thing in our house and in our family so me and my brother played a lot I I realized probably at university that I wasn't as good as I thought I probably was I played for university team and tried to play a couple of semi-pro games whilst at university but I didn't really do anything I think I had one or two appearances which was slightly embarrassing the players here will absolutely batter me but I did have a little stint at Crystal Palace when I was I think under 12 to under 14s again I think that was a story Neil that I might have done with you interview me for the echo absolutely annihilated for that and I still haven't lived that down but now it's just recreational you know when there's staff games I love I love playing I can be seen to be very very weak mentally and people can get in my head quite easily and that can influence how well I play but yeah you just briefly touched on your uncle Glen there I mean he had some playing career and those of a certain age will remember the crazy gang of Wimbledon very well and I know that he was a part of that and a Wales international so how important was he in your career coming into football if you like and just tell us how much do you know about his playing days because they probably would have been when you were very young if even born no I remember him I remember him playing obviously not probably not at the peak of his career like you said at Wimbledon in Oxford and Wales but I remember going with my dad as a kid to watch him play one big memory is watching him warm up and then I was cold I think sitting in the stands and he came running over to me and gave me his drill top when he was playing for Sheffield United and obviously it was the awe of everyone around me taking his drill top off one of the players on the pitch but he's yeah he's a big influence in terms of how I got into football and he's always readily available for advice on football I speak with him very regularly he him and his wife and my cousins up there housed me when I went to Manchester City and put me up you know and I lived with them for a period of time I can't speak highly enough of how he's helped me and the advice that he's given me it's brilliant and a brilliant knowledge to a brilliant person to know and ultimately love as my uncle so yeah I can't speak highly enough Uncle Glen Uncle Glen I think is a very good place to finish we've had you for nearly an hour Dan I know you've got lots of things going on behind the scenes so we'll leave it there for now hopefully it's been really insightful for you guys listening at home Dan it's been great to listen to I guess the process is not just about for your career but how things get to a match day and how those 11 in red and black turn out on a Saturday afternoon so thank you so much for joining us on the podcast No problem Chris, Neil thank you for having me I really enjoyed it Well Neil I don't know about you but over the last hour I have learnt plenty about what goes on behind the scenes of the Sports Science Department Absolutely fascinating insight Chris like I said in the podcast we've gone from absolutely having nothing to do with sports science even in the early 90s like you said it was one man and his job I remember Joe Roach used to run the youth academy all on his own and Sean would run all the physiotherapy side all on his own and now everywhere in football you've got sports scientists and analysts and medical staff it's just such a growing industry and such an important industry and a fascinating insight from Dan there into the workings of it I guess as players have got faster and stronger and the game has moved on so much in terms of the technology available to all these guys as well it just means you have to keep pace don't you with everybody it can be the difference small margins and all that how have things gone it used to be a cup of tea at half time a little bit of deep heat before you went out and that was about it certainly that was what it was like on a Sunday morning I don't know whether that was like a professional but like I said I mean you've got the chef cooking on the coach and we talked about the nutrition I remember the days when they stopped at a fish and chip shop and got cod and chips on the way home Chris it wasn't that long ago cod and chips twice times 11 thank you very much Neil great to have you back alongside on this episode of the podcast if you are listening on your podcast platform don't forget to subscribe and give us a rating you can share us on social media as well just make sure you include the hashtag AFCB pod for all of your club updates remember to go to the club website which is AFCB.co.uk which is also where you'll be able to find out when to listen to the next edition of the official AFC Bournemouth podcast don't forget also to purchase your match pass to watch the upcoming games live on AFCB TV but for myself Chris Temple Neil Parrott and our guest Dan Hodges thanks for listening until next time


Resilience is a word synonymous with former Giants quarterback Phil Sims. He's overcome a lot in his career, but when faced with skin cancer that was a different kind of battle. Sims has now teamed up with Hackensack, Meridian and the Giants to raise awareness and fight the battle. New York Giants quarterback Phil Sims took some big hits over his 14-year career. During that time he had to endure physical punishment, a series of injuries, and he was able to overcome every obstacle with resiliency and determination that came to define him as a player. I wanted to play football since I was a kid I wanted to be a professional football player. So when you're hit with getting hurt or they're not going to play you whatever it is I don't think well this is just going to work out. That just never ended in my mind. I just going to keep playing it's going to work out. But in 2010 Sims was faced with the most difficult challenge of his life.  The doctor walks in and she's about five feet from me she stops and she looks at me and she goes oh my god I'm looking at a cancer patient. Since his diagnosis Sims has had 20 surgical procedures and visits his dermatologist at least 15 times a year for additional treatments. It's kind of a battle and so I sometimes treated that way that this is just getting ready trying to defeat something or somebody or someone whatever and that's it's worked out well for me. Now Sims is teaming up with the NFL New York Giants and Hack and Sac Meridian Health on the crucial catch intercept cancer campaign to address the importance of early detection and risk reduction efforts for skin cancer. Well I think it's great the NFL the Giants are having this crucial catch promotion and trying to alert people about the damage that the sun can do to your skin and the problems that come with it. I think the message that the Giants are promoting it's getting to people. Protect yourself when you're outside as much as you can and don't be afraid to go to the doctors. They got great ways to correct your skin and to help it and prevent cancer, melanomas whatever just because they've come out with so many new techniques. Hack and Sac Meridian Health has come together as a new organization with the merger of Hack and Sac system and the Meridian system and the John Thuror Cancer Center is the lead cancer center in that system. Two major areas of science have come together to dramatically change the way we approach diseases such as skin cancer. One is genomics and the genetics of cancer and fundamentally understanding why a cell turns cancerous and then doing something about that and the second is using the human immune system and harnessing the power of the human immune system to treat cancers including skin cancer. Hack and Sac Meridian Health has created a series of game plans including a specific one to reduce the risk of skin cancer. You can download a copy at hackandsacmeridianhealth.org slash Giants. The Hack and Sac Meridian Health program and you know I've been involved with it for five years about taking care of your skin and being alert for skin cancer and all the science that can come to you. I'm honored to be part of it and I think I'm a good spokesman for it too because I'm living it. Obviously a lovely partnership there but we'd be remiss if we didn't mention Dave Gettleman obviously the Giants general manager who's battling lymphoma and going through treatment at Hack and Sac Meridian. We saw him make his first appearance at a preseason game Friday against the Jets. He's been back around the facility. Sean I know you spoke with him today. Yeah I had a chance to see him in the cafeteria and just great to see him. He looks great. He's got a great personality and he's always having fun so he found time to joke about the fact he doesn't have any hair. So I said look it's an improvement but he said it helps him in the morning. He saves about five minutes every day because he can wash his face in his air at the same time but I think it's great that he's showing the resilience and the battle that we all thought that he would and I think it's great that he's around these guys because I think they appreciate what he's going through as well. Yeah he is fighting this whole situation as if he was an undrafted rookie free agent and that's the beauty of it because he is really going after it. And this team is really coming together around him supporting him it's been a really motivational and wonderful thing to see him out and around this facility.


One of the things I really like about the computer science department at UNC is the professors not only Span a huge area of computer science, but they also mix it pretty well in the different areas So you'll see professors working together on different projects right now in my group for example We're doing real-time systems and one of the big applications is self-driving cars So we're working with some people in the computer vision lab to figure out how we can improve self-driving car Applications to make them safer. I work in an area called real-time systems and what that means is I don't care Only that a program runs correctly I care that it runs on time and that doesn't just mean that it's fast. It means it's predictable So in a system like a self-driving car. I care the pedestrian detection runs on a specific frequency And it always finishes on time There's a bunch of other research areas in the department. There's security graphics robotics medical image analysis vision and People also work on things between the areas. So there's a lot of different research happening The department does a lot of different things So there's graduate students and professors working together on research as well as undergrads learning about computer science and doing research with a grad student grad students and professors So one thing I really like about the research the undergrads are able to do here is they don't have to know a bunch of stuff going into it so we have an undergrad working in our group and He didn't know as much as the grad students did ahead of time. So he helped with little pieces of the project to get familiar I've seen undergrads helping on Anything ranging from tasks like doing a user study So they'll meet with the different users and try out the product or watch the video and determine if it's accurate And as they progress through working in the group they actually get more involved in the general project So I've seen a huge range of it But the professors and the grad students are pretty good about getting the undergrads up to speed Without expecting them to already know everything that it takes four years to learn So something that I think helps a student coming into the UNC CS department be really successful is Being curious about the field It you can get by by taking classes Maybe doing some internships get a job and you can be happy But the people I've seen that really thrive are the ones who want to learn more So they'll take a class and then they spend the summer doing a project on their own something that was inspired by the class But completely based off of their interests and so I think that curiosity and that desire to apply what they're learning to their Own lives is really great These are images taken from the south building, which is one of the buildings here at UNC Here somebody went around the building and took a bunch of photographs of it and the idea is to go from these Individual images and work out an actual 3d model of the scene So in this case we went from these images and turned it into this 3d model here So each one of these Red rectangles is one camera, but the idea is basically that We look at these images and we detect Points in the images that could be recognizable say corners of windows and Once we have that information that we try to match find corresponding points in multiple images so if I have these two images say I might want to find points on the door that match up and And then I determined that this is a correspondence between the two images and I kind of work up from there To actually figure out where these points might lie in 3d and Actually place them there at the same time recover the position at which the images were taken these each one of these red rectangles here And so in the end you get this 3d model and this is kind of like the first step and actually Going from imagery to like nice realistic Models this is kind of like our final output is once we have these camera positions. We can actually Build up denser and nicer Representations of the scene so here we had a drone flying over a golf course and we got a bunch of individual images and We joined them together using this first approach Which is called structure from motion and then once we do that then we can build up actual like Realistic models, so if someone was say wanted to use this for Mapping terrain of an environment or obtaining a 3d model of a building that they could view say in virtual reality or augmented reality Or other applications could include like autonomous driving There's there's so many applications for figuring out where cameras or where images are located And figuring out what the shape and Structure of terrain is straight from structure of buildings are I think the thing that's most rewarding is going from Basically having no information, which is just the images and actually building up things that look really realistic And that where you can actually kind of have this idea of Visiting somewhere that you've never been before Just because you can build up a 3d model of it and look at it Once we have these 3d models and we want to visualize them one of the things that is missing is that we don't have any people in the scene And we also don't our method right now doesn't really get ground surfaces. So one thing that we've Been working towards is actually placing people into the scene just by detecting them in the individual images and And going from there and making some reasoning about where they might be standing one of the other things that We've worked on at UNC is building up 3d models of the inside of the body if someone if a doctor suspects that a patient has throat cancer and they want to See if they have a tumor what they'll do is they'll do an endoscopy Which is where they thread a camera through the nose and down into the throat and they get a video of the throat and there They can see maybe if there's a tumor present But one of the problems is that when the doctors Actually want to maybe perform some procedure like removing the tumor and they're not able to use this data in any meaningful way They can just look at say a CT scan and say roughly where they think the tumor is based on what they saw the endoscopy So one of the projects that we were we have been working on is to take the endoscopy and actually turn it into a 3d model that we can view in the space of the CT and There the doctor can actually see the texture and the color of the tumor and Better localize it for treatment. We've also done work on this in the colon as well So one of the things that we've become interested in is how are people going to interact in VR? So it's not enough to just have somebody be physically present. They should look like them They should move like them. They should work the way that they work So we've been using some brand new fancy equipment to actually physically scan people's avatars Take their whole body and bring it into virtual reality and then try to capture the motions that they produce when they move So essentially we've developed a pipeline where we can bring someone into our lab We can take a scan of their body We use a connect center to capture properties of their movements We can analyze those movements and from a database of high quality human motion We can actually generate their walking style and generate a virtual avatar that they can use to play games or Interact socially that looks and moves the way that they do. So how long does it take to do something like this? Well, right now we can bring someone into our lab We take a physical scan of their body, which takes about a minute that physical scan gets uploaded to the cloud and processed And then we actually do the whole walking study while that video is processing and by the time that's done Usually about 15 minutes later. We can have their avatar ready to put into a game So the end result is that we're now looking at how to design social experiences that revolve around Playing games and interacting with other people using your own avatar So what you're seeing here is my my co-author on these papers and the lead researcher on a lot of these products Project Sahil and I are actually going to play a game where we're moving around in VR We're interacting with virtual agents. We're talking to the crowd all using our own bodies and our own walking styles so the other aspect of my research here is Leveraging some of what we've learned about how people and and entities navigate to do some work in self-driving cars So we've actually built a simulator in partnership with some colleagues at the University of Central Florida where we can test cars driving around on the road and Subject them to emergency conditions and see how they react So this vehicle is actually planning and and navigating autonomously And we can do things like having a car pull out in front of it and it swerves to avoid it safely The idea is that when we use simulation to test these kind of things We can put the vehicles in dangerous situations where we might not be willing to put a real driver But we can still test and evaluate how safe autonomous vehicles are Ultimately, these kind of vehicles will have a huge impact on the future of transport in life in the United States and around the World once we can solve the problems of safety and and those kind of issues So these are just some of the projects that researchers like me get to work on here at the University of North Carolina And researchers all over the country So pursuing a career in computer science and an advanced degree in this field gives you the opportunity To work on cutting-edge problems that have direct impacts on the lives of billions of people For example with autonomous driving where the cusp of our evolution which will change the way every person on this planet lives These are the kind of problems we get to tackle and the kind of impacts we get to make When when we work in computer science and you can work in entertainment You don't have to just work in engineering or autonomous driving. There are millions of possibilities When you get a degree in a field like this, there's a certain kind of thinking that's required for computer science You have to be able to break problems down Logically think of things in steps because a lot of times what's intuitive for humans is not so intuitive when we try to Encode it in machines So what one thing I would suggest is try logic puzzles try to think about things as a sequence of steps Can you think about how a design gets created from start to finish and try to work that out? Obviously there's a lot of programming so familiarity with computers is a good idea It's never too early to start and in fact there are more tools available now than ever To self-study some basic computer science concepts to learn to do some basic programming on your own There there's a multitude of resources even before you get into college I can give you a jumpstart on on how to solve these kind of problems and tackle these issues so I work in surgical robotics here at UNC in the Department of Computer Science and mainly what we're looking at is Enabling minimally invasive surgery Through new robotic technologies and so a lot of these technologies look a lot different than what you would expect robots to look like They can look like small Needled tentacle like devices and so that's kind of the the class of robots that we work on here from a surgical robotics perspective Currently in minimally invasive surgery a lot of the tools end up looking a lot like this tool here, which as you can see Is what would be inserted into the body But is very long and straight and this means that in order to get to different parts of anatomy the physicians have to frequently Make very large holes in the patient to get the tools to the piece of anatomy that they want to manipulate Surgically so what we're looking at doing is instead of having long straight devices like this Adding small curved devices to the physician's toolbox. So that would be things that look like this maybe Or this and if we have these small curved devices what we can then do is access different pieces of anatomy in less invasive fashion. So if we have say Tumor in the pituitary gland, which is in the base of the skull in your brain Then it rather than having to open up large holes in the anatomy to get to that we can enable the physician to go in through the nasal passageway and Do that surgery in a much more minimally invasive fashion? So that's what this robot here is designed to do. So it's made up of nested Pre-curved night and all tubes which is what these are and night and all is a super elastic material It's a nickel titanium alloy and what these tubes the property that these tubes have that makes them special is that when we Set their shape so we put a curve into this tube from then on it will be flexible But return to that shape we set it in so what this allows us to do is take multiple of these tubes and nest them inside One another and then we can rotate and translate these tubes with respect to one another and that causes the tubes themselves to take very Interesting curved shapes through space and so then by rotating and translating these tubes We can manipulate tissue through these nasal passageways Without having to make large holes in your anatomy This doesn't look like what you think a robot looks like what you see on TV with big arms and moving around maybe so Basically, it's a robot because it's manipulated by these motors and It causes some change in the world. So that's what we think of as robots something that's moving and causing change in the world so these are the motors here that Drive this robot and there are six of them total because there are three tubes So it takes two motor motors to manipulate each tube what we do here at UNC in the Department of Computer Science is we Take sensory input for the robot in the form of CT scans of the patient's anatomy and magnetic tracking systems That tell us what the state of the robot is with respect to the patient's anatomy and we take that input and some Specification of what the physician wants the robot to do in the anatomy and we determine the motion planning algorithms What the motors each need to do in order to make the robots accomplish that task that the physician is specifying in order to Evaluate our algorithms and experiment with this robot currently. We're doing work in 3d printed anatomical models so that's like this 3d printed model of the skull base here and we get these by taking CT scans of patients and Segmenting out these volumes from the CT scan and then creating a mesh of the surface and then sending that to be 3d printed so by doing that it allows us to experiment in anatomy that's Exactly the same as what would be in the patient but without having to Experiment with tissue at this stage yet to get into this work You don't need a medical background one of the wonderful things about UNC is that we work very closely with The physicians and surgeons in the medical school here So they kind of handle the medical background for this and we come in With a computational background So if you have experience with programming if you have experience with math with physics These are all really great stepping stones to get you into work like what I do here with this robot what I really like about robotics specifically is When you look at the field of computer science a lot of the other fields you write code you can Solve a lot of very complicated problems But at the end of the day a lot of it's kind of contained in the computer What's neat about robotics is that the code that you write the algorithms that you develop Actually ends up moving things in the real world because these robots go around Changing how the physical state of the world is and that's not something that you get in a lot of areas of computer science And that's something that I find particularly satisfying so a lot of what I was describing with the surgical robots where we Determined how to move the robots in the real world to accomplish some task doesn't have to stay Restricted to the surgical robots So a lot of those algorithms that we develop actually apply to these robots as well Which look a lot more like what you expect robots to look like when you think of robots So we have three robots here in the lab. We have this robot, which is the fetch robot We have this little guy, which is the now robot and this large robot over here is Baxter And so we use all three of these to do experimentation with these motion planning algorithms to see how well our algorithms are performing in the real world Most of our robots are Stationary we call them manipulators because they take arms or something like the tentacles that you saw on the surgical robot and manipulate the world The robots like the Mars rover or the MIT running animal-based robots Those are more mobile robots and so these are kind of two different fields and robotics But a lot of the algorithms applied of both but This robot here fetch actually is a mobile robot with a manipulator arm so we call that a mobile manipulator but Fetch drives around in the world and then can manipulate the state of the world with its arm as well so in a lot of sense or in some senses the Algorithms required to tell fetch where to go in the world before it starts manipulating things Those are very similar to what you would see when you're trying to determine how to move the Mars rover around the surface of Mars For these robots the sensors are very different this this robot has an RGBD depth sensor like what you would imagine like the Microsoft connect has and This robot has some ultrasonic sensors as well as this one and we use a lot of cameras and other things to kind of get the State of the environment as well as the state of the robots That's a lot different than with the surgical robots where we're looking at magnetic fields and CT scans but at the end of the day, it's just some input telling you the state of the world and You're trying to generate the output for the motors to tell the robot what to do One of the big challenges with mobile robots and mobile manipulators like fetch is battery life So a lot of what we look at especially in the algorithmic side is how to Make the robot do the things that it needs to do while it consumes as little power as possible And that means making the motor movements very efficient making the planning for the paths that the robots take very efficient And even making the code which has to execute on the robot very efficient because the CPUs take up power as well Not just the motors so a lot of what we do is Determining these motions for the motors and writing code that's optimal from a power consumption standpoint because battery life is a very big constraint and a very applicable topic in in robotics at the end of the day what you want to do is take some sensor input and Determine how to move the motors and the robots to accomplish the task That's the same for both the surgical robots and these robots But the sensors look a lot different the motors look a lot different and how the motors actually the robot in the world looks a lot Different between these different cases