This past March, Dr. Aston K. McCullough (Director, Laboratory for the Scientific Study of Dance—LAB:SYNC) represented the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and LAB:SYNC at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) 2022 International Workshop on the Neural and Social Bases of Creative Movement at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. McCullough’s talk, “Methods and Sensors for Quantifying Dance Exposures,” was held during the workshop session titled Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Technology, and Creative Movement. During his presentation, McCullough focused on the state-of-the-art with respect to quantifying dance exposures, he highlighted some methodological difficulties inherent in quantifying dance exposures, and he pointed toward new algorithms and software that LAB:SYNC is currently developing as an NEA Research Lab to advance scientific research on dance.
At LAB:SYNC, McCullough and his team are developing algorithms and software that help facilitate the process of analyzing dance behavior via sensors. He presented three original Apps during his NSF talk that LAB:SYNC will release in 2022: iDANCE (Integrated Dance Motion Capture Calibration Suite), SANDS (Signal Analysis Nexus for Dance Science), and DIVAS (Dance Image and Video Analysis Suite). Each App respectively advances the work of researchers and educators who are interested in quantifying dance exposures by affording the field with valid and reliable methods for calibrating signals from wearable sensors, images, and video; analyzing data from wearable sensors; conducting exploratory kinematic analyses on image and video data; and developing ground truth labels for an array of human activity recognition projects.
The 2022 NSF workshop brought together researchers from around the globe to share questions, hypotheses, methods, and results from the field of dance science. Across the multi-day workshop, artists, scientists, and engineers convened to illustrate our current collective trajectory in dance science, in addition to new vistas for research in the future. To view presentations from the 2022 NSF workshop on dance science, visit here.