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Stats Perform’s Chief Scientist to Present the Newest AI Innovations in Soccer Analytics at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

March 5, 2020

Chicago/London – March 5, 2020 – Stats Perform, the revolutionary leader in sports AI and data, announced that Chief Scientist Dr. Patrick Lucey will deliver a Competitive Advantage presentation at the MIT Sloan Sports and Analytics Conference (SSAC) in Boston on Friday, March 6.

Founded in 2006, MIT SSAC has grown to become one of the premier showcases in the industry, with over 3,500 in attendance at last year’s event. The sold-out conference will take place March 6-7 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

Dr. Lucey’s Competitive Advantage titled, ‘Measuring the Immeasurable: Solving Soccer Analytics Using Machine Learning and Computer Vision,’ will demonstrate how Stats Perform is using proprietary computer vision and machine learning technology to dissect all aspects of the “world game” regardless of league, quality, style or data coverage. Dr. Lucey will discuss how Stats Perform’s new capabilities are changing the way the game is analyzed, including for recruitment, by forecasting how a player will play on another team; team performance, by accurately measuring formations in soccer; and tracking measurement, by capturing tracking data directly from broadcast video.

“We have seen the data analytics revolutionize in almost every sport over the years, yet soccer has always remained the biggest challenge due to the hard-to-quantify continuous play and different playing styles across leagues and competitions,” Dr. Lucey said. “Over the years, Stats Perform has presented research breaking down all aspects of the game, but now, I’m proud to say, we’ve finally solved it and can create a complete game analysis in a digestible format. During my presentation, I will demonstrate how we are using computer vision, AI and machine learning to dissect constantly changing playing styles and predict in-match outcomes based on player substitution and transfers, all at the click of a button through the industry’s most comprehensive soccer query and analysis tool—Edge.”

In addition to Dr. Lucey’s panel, Stats Perform will also be presenting findings from their paper “You Cannot Do That Ben Stokes: Dynamically Predicting Shot Type in Cricket Using a Personalized Deep Neural Network,” which introduces a new model for dynamically predicting a batsman’s shot type in One Day International cricket using ball-by-ball Opta event data. The paper presentation will take place on Saturday, March 7 and the full paper can be downloaded on the MIT Sloan Best Research Paper Track website here.

In the past five years, Stats Perform has reached the finals of the MIT Sloan Best Research Paper Track four times, winning best paper in 2016 and runner-up in 2017 and 2018.