Stanford bioengineers encourage virtual competitors to vie for a different
  kind of athletic title
From: Stanford News - 08/07/2017
By; Nathan Collins

Better models of the bone, muscles and nerves that control our bodies could
help doctors manage movement disorders like cerebral palsy. A new competition
is crowdsourcing the search for those tools.

Teams of machine learning and artificial intelligence enthusiasts are
competing to see who can best train computer-generated skeletons to mimic
those complex human movements. Perhaps the coaches are doing it for glory or
prizes or fun, but the event's creator has a serious end goal: making life
better for kids with cerebral palsy.

Lukasz Kidzinski, a postdoctoral fellow in bioengineering, dreamed up the
contest as a way to better understand how people with cerebral palsy will
respond to muscle-relaxing surgery. Often, doctors resort to surgery to
improve a patient’s gait, but it doesn’t always work.

In the long run, Kidzinski said he hopes the work may benefit more than just
kids with cerebral palsy. For example, it may help others design
better-calibrated devices to assist with walking or carrying loads, and
similar ideas could be used to find better baseball pitches or sprinting
techniques.

Read the entire article at:
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/08/07/virtual-competitors-vie-different-kind-athletic-title

Link:
NIPS 2017: Learning to Run - Reinforcement learning environments with
  musculoskeletal models
https://www.crowdai.org/challenges/nips-2017-learning-to-run

Virtual Contests for Movement Disorders
https://www.mdtmag.com/news/2017/08/photo-day-virtual-contests-movement-disorders