The true story of how Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane constructed consistently strong baseball teams on a small budget brought to the world's attention the importance of data analysis in sports. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is driving a revolution in sports as data analysis did earlier in the century. But this one will likely have much bigger consequences, as sports data and technology firm Stats Perform in Chicago believes. For pro general managers and college recruiting staffs who decide whom to trade for, whom to draft and whom to recruit -- decisions that make or break teams and careers -- AI offers in-depth knowledge never before available. "To see how AI will disrupt sports is exciting," said Nancy Hensley, who recently joined Stats Perform from IBM. "Let's say you're looking to fill out your soccer team, and on paper, two strikers look similar," said Nancy Hensley, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Stats Perform on LaSalle Street.

Stats Perform, the revolutionary leader in sports AI and data, announced that Chief Scientist Dr. Patrick Lucey will deliver keynote remarks at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20) Workshop in Team Sport in New York on Saturday, February 8. Dr. Lucey's presentation "Interactive Sports Analytics" will examine new ways to break down player or team performance using big data and AI software. The presentation will include examples of how coaches can draw up and search for specific plays and, using AI and Stats Perform's decades of tracking and multi-agent trajectory data, simulate likely outcomes specific to a particular opponent and the players involved. In addition, Dr. Lucey will demonstrate the capabilities of new body-pose data made possible through Stats Perform's state of the art AutoSTATS technology. "We have reached an exciting moment in sports where coaches and analysts can now leverage big data and AI to generate advanced insights on play development and likely outcomes," Dr. Lucey said. "Imagine a coach drawing up an X's and O's play, the same way he would on chalkboard, on an iPad and simulating likely outcomes based on different sets of offensive and defensive opponents in-play. Imagine then being able to search that play and find video of every time a near similar play was run. With AI and big data, we are already making that happen at Stats Perform and I can't wait to meet and discuss this with the illustrious group of researchers at the AAAI Workshop."