This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics, MLSA 2018, colocated with ECML/PKDD 2018, in Dublin, Ireland, in September 2018. The 12 full papers presented together with 4 challenge papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 submissions. The papers present a variety of topics, covering the team sports American football, basketball, ice hockey, and soccer, as well as the individual sports cycling and martial arts. In addition, four challenge papers are included, reporting on how to predict pass receivers in soccer.

This brief highlights the application of performance analysis tools in data acquisition, and various machine learning algorithms for evaluating team performance as well as talent identification in beach soccer and sepak takraw. Numerous performance indicators and human performance parameters are considered based on their relevance to each sport. The findings presented here demonstrate that the key performance indicators as well as human performance parameters can be used in the future evaluation of team performance as well as talent identification in these sports. Accordingly, they offer a valuable resource for coaches, club managers, talent identification experts, performance analysts and other relevant stakeholders involved in performance assessments.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics, MLSA 2020, colocated with ECML/PKDD 2020, in Ghent, Belgium, in September 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. The 11 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. The papers present a variety of topics within the area of sports analytics, including tactical analysis, outcome predictions, data acquisition, performance optimization, and player evaluation.

To understand the dynamic patterns of behaviours and interactions between athletes that characterize successful performance in different sports is an important challenge for all sport practitioners. This book guides the reader in understanding how an ecological dynamics framework for use of artificial intelligence (AI) can be implemented to interpret sport performance and the design of practice contexts. By examining how AI methodologies are utilized in team games, such as football, as well as in individual sports, such as golf and climbing, this book provides a better understanding of the kinematic and physiological indicators that might better capture athletic performance by looking at the current state-of-the-art AI approaches. Artificial Intelligence in Sport Performance Analysis provides an all-encompassing perspective in an innovative approach that signals practical applications for both academics and practitioners in the fields of coaching, sports analysis, and sport science, as well as related subjects such as engineering, computer and data science, and statistics.

Explore the world of using machine learning methods with deep computer vision, sensors and data in sports, health and fitness and other industries. Accompanied by practical step-by-step Python code samples and Jupyter notebooks, this comprehensive guide acts as a reference for a data scientist, machine learning practitioner or anyone interested in AI applications. These ML models and methods can be used to create solutions for AI enhanced coaching, judging, athletic performance improvement, movement analysis, simulations, in motion capture, gaming, cinema production and more. Packed with fun, practical applications for sports, machine learning models used in the book include supervised, unsupervised and cutting-edge reinforcement learning methods and models with popular tools like PyTorch, Tensorflow, Keras, OpenAI Gym and OpenCV. Author Kevin Ashley—who happens to be both a machine learning expert and a professional ski instructor—has written an insightful book that takes you on a journey of modern sport science and AI. Filled with thorough, engaging illustrations and dozens of real-life examples, this book is your next step to understanding the implementation of AI within the sports world and beyond. Whether you are a data scientist, a coach, an athlete, or simply a personal fitness enthusiast excited about connecting your findings with AI methods, the author’s practical expertise in both tech and sports is an undeniable asset for your learning process. Today’s data scientists are the future of athletics, and Applied Machine Learning for Health and Fitness hands you the knowledge you need to stay relevant in this rapidly growing space. What You'll Learn Use multiple data science tools and frameworks Apply deep computer vision and other machine learning methods for classification, semantic segmentation, and action recognition Build and train neural networks, reinforcement learning models and more Analyze multiple sporting activities with deep learning Use datasets available today for model training Use machine learning in the cloud to train and deploy models Apply best practices in machine learning and data science Who This Book Is For Primarily aimed at data scientists, coaches, sports enthusiasts and athletes interested in connecting sports with technology and AI methods.

It seems that artificial intelligence (AI) is always just five years away, but it never arrives. Recently, however. developments have made the practical utility of game theory a genuine reality. Will sport provide the petri dish in which AI will prove itself? What do domain specialists like managers and coaches want to know that they can’t currently find out, and can AI provide the answer? What competitive advantages might AI provide for recruitment, performance and tactics, health and fitness, pedagogy, broadcasting, eSports, gambling and stadium design in the future? Written by leading experts in both sports management and AI, AI for Sports begins to answer these and many other questions on the future of AI for sports.

We seem to be living in the age of A.I. Everywhere you look, companies are touting their most recent A.I., machine learning, and deep learning breakthroughs, even when they are far short of anything that could be dubbed a "breakthrough." "A.I." has eclipsed "Blockchain" and "Crypto" as the buzzword of today. The A.I. Sports Book breaks down A.I., machine learning, and deep learning into five unique business use cases-sound, time series, text, image, and video-and reveals how sports book marketing executives can utilize this powerful technology to help them more finely tune their marketing campaigns, better segment their customers, increase lead generation, and foster strong customer loyalty. Today, "Personalization"-the process of utilizing mobile, social, geo-location data, web morphing, context and even affective computing to tailor messages and experiences to an individual interacting with them-is becoming the optimum word in a radically new customer intelligence environment. The A.I. Sports Book explains this complex technology in simple to understand terms and then shows how sports book marketers can utilize the psychology of personalization with A.I. to both create more effective marketing campaigns as well as increase customer loyalty. Pearson shows companies how to avoid Adobe's warning of not using industrial-age technology in the digital era. Pearson also reveals how to create a platform of technology that seamlessly integrates EDW and real-time streaming data with social media content. Analytical models and neural nets can then be built on both commercial and open source technology to better understand the customer, thereby strengthening the brand and, just as importantly, increasing ROI.The A.I. Sports Book reveals how these and other technologies can help shape the customer journey. The book details how the five types of analytics-descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive, and edge analytics-affect not only the customer journey, but also just about every operating function in a sports book. An IoT-connected sports book can make its operations smart. Connected devices can help with inventory optimization, labor management, marketing, and customer experience, as well as keep its data centers green and its energy use smart. Social media is no longer a vanity platform, but rather it is a place to both connect with current customers as well as court new ones. The A.I. Sports Book knows that social media can produce a healthy ROI, if done properly. Social media can also be utilized as a place to gauge a customer's psychological profile; it's amazing how much information there is in a Facebook like, a Twitter Tweet, or a YouTube comment. The A.I. Sports Book breaks down social media into its six different categories -- collaborative projects, blogs and micros blogs, content communities, social networks, virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds -- and shows sports books how to utilize each one to both market to individuals as well as to attain real-time competitive intel. This book will help sports betting executives break through the technological clutter so that they can deliver an unrivaled customer experience to each and every one of their patrons to ensure that they keep coming through those front doors, as well as onto their websites.