I was honored to be part of the PhD committee of Tom Runia, about periodic motion in video. At the University of Amsterdam, with promotors prof. Cees Snoek and Arnold Smeulders. Periodic motion is important as it appears in many activities such as sports, working and cooking.

What’s more: periodicity is a known attention cue for the human visual system. It was interesting to ask questions to the PhD candidate and discuss with him.

My question was about periodicity of sequences, such as Messi dribbling. Dribbling consists of performing multiple dribbles, where one dribble is composed of step, touch ball, turn body. One idea is to introduce a higher-level analyisis beyond periodicity of optical flow, by periodicity of smaller activities represented as some sort of atoms.

Congratulations to Tom, Cees and Arnold on the inspiring research & beautiful thesis!