Discussion: GC Websync Activity Type

How does AP learn what activity types you do and automatically assign them? The fact that it knows I've been cycling is quite obvious. But the fact it knows I've been orienteering still amazes me. Tonight I went for a road run, which I've only just started logging separately to non-tarmac runs (just so I can keep track). I've only done this a few times and it's already learned!

A lot of us have wondered this for a while. Probably a trade secret.

Perhaps it's the slow-downs to punch? Or laps if you take them while orienteering?

probably syncing the location and time with a known calendar of events

An army of gnomes in Ken's basement that follow each Attackpoint user around on their workouts then assign the activities when they're uploaded

Nothing to do with the calendar. I went for a warm up run to an unofficial event site yesterday then ran that and it knew to categorise one as a run and the other as urban orienteering. It possibly recognises patterns in movement as well as different speeds compared to your past performance. The 'orienteering' component of the run didn't have any slow downs (nothing physical to punch) although I did record splits.

My MTB ride on Tuesday though was classified as MTB orienteering although it's a route I've done many times before and always put down as MTB so it's not foolproof!

The general idea is that AP computes a number of feature characteristics about each of your sessions and activity types. It can then use the distributions of those values to classify new sessions as whichever of your activity types they are most likely to be (with mixed success).

The actual features are all related to things in the data file like speed, grade, heart rate, cadence, power output, and a few other contrived values like a measure of how straight or twisty the track is. It doesn't consider the location at all, except to compute those secondary things about the shape of the track.

Originally I tried gnomes, but they were moody and too expensive to feed.

Ken you're amazing:-))

Thanks Ken!

Ken you're amazing:-))

+1

I've been impressed by this for ages as it's so accurate. I kinda guessed it used things like overall speed, speed variation but would never have guessed twistyness of the track!

Awesome modelling Ken!

What happened to the gnomes?

Probably prefer skiing.

Thanks for this redirect Ken. I was wondering if that "shape" of the route element i.e. twistiness etc were involved. It feels like the stand-out feature, while I'm sure all the others like distance, pace etc impact more on other activities (e.g. differentiating between a road run and a hill run), orienteering seems to rarely be as direct in route as any normal running, and it is much twistier.

On another note, do you get a notification if someone posts a comment with the string "ken" in it? Maybe best not answer that one actually.

Originally I tried gnomes, but they were moody and too expensive to feed.

Ahh, there's your mistake - you used elite orie gnomes.

The really impressive part is that it's not categorizing the sessions based into activities that Ken defined. It's using the activity types that each of us defined for ourselves. Somebody might have just cycling, rowing, and inline skating as activity types, and it still works.