Team coordination dynamics – DYNATEAM

The DYNATEAM project: Team coordination dynamics is an inter-disciplinary project intertwining computer and data sciences with humanities, in particular experimental psychology and cognitive sciences, sharing the complexity paradigm. According to the complexity sciences, a team is a complex dynamical system characterized by emergence and self-organization principles, i.e., its behavior is not organized from outside, but from the interactions among its components. However, in team sport, the coach often attempts to control players by verbal instructions. Thus, the innovative objectives of our project in experimental psychology and cognitive sciences are to study the added-value of a non-linear pedagogy favoring the emergence and self-organization principles during social interactions in rugby and basketball, in comparison to an instructionalist pedagogy often used by coaches.
Moreover, the complexity of a social network is often associated to the number of individuals composing this network, modeled by social network analysis through static graphs. However in team sport, the number of players is limited and complexity further comes from the dynamical and temporarily characteristics of the interactions during team performance. Our objectives in computer and data sciences are innovative because they include temporal and spatial dimensions, 1) by studying the dynamics of social interactions through dynamical graph of passes network, 2) by splitting the playing area into sub-regions to take into account the spatial configuration of the team when studying social interactions, 3) by using machine learning techniques to predict social interactions and decision-making of the players according to the constraints on the network.