Advancing sports analytics through AI research
Advancing sports analytics through AI research
“Creating testing environments to help progress AI research out of the lab and into the real world is immensely challenging. Given AI’s long association with games, it is perhaps no surprise that sports presents an exciting opportunity, offering researchers a testbed in which an AI-enabled system can assist humans in making complex, real-time decisions in a multiagent environment with dozens of dynamic, interacting individuals.
The rapid growth of sports data collection means we are in the midst of a remarkably important era for sports analytics. The availability of sports data is increasing in both quantity and granularity, transitioning from the days of aggregate high-level statistics and sabermetrics to more refined data such as event stream information (e.g., annotated passes or shots), high-fidelity player positional information, and on-body sensors. However, the field of sports analytics has only recently started to harness machine learning and AI for both understanding and advising human decision-makers in sports. In our recent paper published in collaboration with Liverpool Football Club (LFC) in JAIR, we envision the future landscape of sports analytics using a combination of statistical learning, video understanding, and game theory. We illustrate football, in particular, is a useful microcosm for studying AI research, offering benefits in the longer-term to decision-makers in sports in the form of an automated video-assistant coach (AVAC) system (Figure 1(A))…”
Source: deepmind.com/blog/article/advancing-sports-analytics-through-ai