MIT Sloan recently sat down with 2016 Research Competition winner and STATS’ Director of Data Science, Patrick Lucey, to talk about what it was like winning the competition and his experience being a part of the conference.
Read Patrick and team’s winning paper, “The Thin Edge of the Wedge”: Accurately Predicting Shot Outcomes in Tennis using Style and Context Priors, which aimed to discover player-specific patterns of player movement and ball striking in tennis which are indicative of changing the probability of winning a point in professional tennis.
"At STATS we have an enormous amount of tracking data in both basketball and soccer, and have invested heavily in data-science – so it has been a really exciting time. We have 6 full-time data-scientists (first author of the paper, Xinyu Wei, was my first hire) and had 4 research interns over the summer, and we are always looking for more talented data scientists to join our team! We are doing some cool stuff in deep learning using trajectories, in addition to working on other fundamental artificial intelligence problems in sport which I couldn’t do anywhere else."