Bahrain sprints ahead to become hub for sports artificial intelligence

TDT | Manama                                      

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com   

Reported by Julia Cassano  

Bahrain is all set to become a centre for artificial intelligence (AI) to advance the future of sports in the Kingdom and provide the resources needed to accelerate it.

This was highlighted at the Second International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held yesterday at the Intercontinental Regency Hotel as part of the Bahrain Sport Summit, organized by the General Sports Authority (GSA) in cooperation with the initiatives of HH Shaikh Khalid bin Hamad Al Khalifa.

Various international speakers in the sciences of future sports technology discussed the latest solutions, software, and developments in sports, including predicting counter plans and match results, the use of computer vision in monitoring the movements of players, virtual assistant coaches, analytics, and future innovations that will advance the sports industry.

Bahrain has already begun the transition in swimming and tennis, and the summit can help build solutions and recommendations on how artificial intelligence can further advance sports in the Kingdom.

Dr. Anthony Cioppa, a postdoctoral researcher at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and the University of Liege in Belgium, highlighted the use of technology and computer vision to understand more about the game of soccer. He presented SoccerNet, one of the largest and most compressive data sets for sports analysis in the world.

SoccerNet is a large-scale dataset for soccer video understanding and has evolved over the years to include various tasks such as action spotting, camera calibration, player re-identification, and tracking. SoccerNet is not only a dataset; however, it includes yearly challenges where the best teams compete at the international level.

Another special speaker, Dr. Chan Yun, cyber security leader for the Centre for Cyber Physical Systems at Khalifa University, spoke about AI techniques based on mental and physical fitness monitoring. “By using artificial intelligence, we can now collect data on all players as well as individual players." This helps to analyze and critique specific players as well as an overall team.

"AI gives us more information on players’ abilities and limitations, and this is crucial for the coach and the manager to be able to make quality decisions based on data, training, and performance.” Badr Busabat, head of the Al Together International Organization, spoke about the importance of data and AI and the significance that it gives to the sports industry. Although artificial intelligence is crucial to the sports industry, Busabat emphasized that AI has an immense impact on all sectors.

“There is a massive economic opportunity in artificial intelligence as all data is essential to all industries, especially the sports industry.” Injury data is crucial to sports. For example, when teams obtain the knowledge, information, and data regarding a player’s injury history, AI assists clubs in making better decisions based on that data. If a player has a high possibility of getting injured or there is an objective to sell a specific player to another club, this can impact negotiations with counter clubs.

The goal of artificial intelligence and exchanging data is to increase and enhance the quality of decision-making. Busabat also highlighted that the point of AI is not to replace humans such as coaches or managers in the sports industry but rather to improve decision-making for those people to enhance the industry as a whole.

AI will not replace humans. We need humans to create new ideas and launch new economic opportunities. There is no contradiction in companies automating more tasks while also hiring more people. This means that when a company wants to automate, the same companies will always need people such as managers and coaches to create new ideas and new strategies when it comes to managing a team.

"New ideas and creativity posed by humans combined with artificial intelligence will accelerate development and strategy in sports,” Busabat said. Now, more soccer clubs are using AI technology to keep track of and analyze their games as a team, every individual player’s performance, and how their competitors play.