UH Biocomputation Group - Edward Wakelam

Exploitation of footballer analytics

2024-02-10T17:50:05+00:00

On this week's Journal Club session, Edward Wakelam will give a talk entitled "Exploitation of footballer analytics".

There is growing on-going research into how footballer attributes, collected prior to, during and post-match, may address the demands of clubs, media pundits and gaming developers. These attributes include static, such as age and height, or dynamic, such as pass completions and shots on target. Many are objectively measured, such as goals scored or pass interceptions, but in some cases they are subjectively measured by observers, such as quality of passing or athleticism. A handful of databases are available to clubs to be used to assess transfer targets or to assess their current players, however even elite clubs are failing to exploit this data. Additionally, there is limited application of AI and Machine Learning methods to exploit the wealth of data available. Critically, very few of the attributes address character traits, despite their use by the commercial world for 130 years and some well publicised problem player recruitment. I will present an analysis of the data available collected from available research over the past 25 years, identifying the mix of static vs dynamic and objective vs subjective data, and draw attention to the limited character trait content of the data. I will discuss the likely reason for this and how clubs may develop this dimension of their player analytics.

Papers:

E. Wakelam, V. Steuber, J. Wakelam, "The collection, analysis and exploitation of footballer attributes: A systematic review", 2022, Journal of Sports Analytics, 8, 31--67

Date: 2024/02/16
Time: 14:00
Location: C258 & online

Predictive analytics based student intervention

2017-04-04T16:33:18+01:00

The field of Learning Analytics is beginning to gain traction in educational institutions, with perhaps the main driver being the prediction of student outcomes in order to identify students at risk. This is not just key to improving the student experience, but critical to institutional budgets, where student withdrawals can cause significant damage to revenue streams. However, the identification of students at risk is only useful when positive and successful interventions are made. Currently, institutional interventions are ad-hoc and usually based upon the experience and style/approach of the individual tutor or course leader, with supporting institutional processes arguably focussed upon protecting the establishment. An emerging area is that of using intelligent techniques to provide evidential input and specific intelligent support to the intervention process itself. In addition to describing the relevant issues and methods I will describe the approach taken by the Open University, a leader in the field.

Date: 07/04/2017
Time: 16:00
Location: LB252

Understanding how corporations align their strategies and objectives ensures career development ahead of people that don't

2017-01-12T10:31:42+00:00

All successful organisations ensure that their corporate IT strategy is fully and continuously aligned with their business strategy from vision and mission statements, through corporate objectives, business planning and management accounting to individual staff objectives. Day to day synchronisation of all of these components across all organisational departments, for example Finance, Sales, Delivery, Customer Support, Human Resources and Marketing, is a key objective of corporate IT implementations. Exploiting the latest technological developments challenges the IT function, however, change (under control) is a positive driver for businesses, usually generating their most profitable business. I will discuss the component parts of organisations and how they work together and how cognisance and understanding of this is career beneficial, how change is the norm and what personal strategies are key to success.

Date: 13/01/2017
Time: 16:00
Location: LB252

Sloping the interview and career development playing fields in your favour

2016-07-19T14:30:27+01:00

Organisations have to ensure that they recruit the best candidates at every level and develop their staff in paths closely aligned with their corporate styles, missions and objectives. This not only ensures a positive and integrated work force and organisation, it also allows protection against maverick interviewers and managers promoting or overlooking staff randomly (or worse). To achieve this, most professional organisations have clearly defined processes which guide and regulate interviewers and which formalise staff development. Understanding these formal processes and methods will give candidates and staff a substantial advantage over those who don't. My talk will give attendees a comprehensive view of real examples of interview questions and crucially the real assessment criteria that the interviewer is looking to document evidence of suitability against. In respect of career development my talk will give you a comprehensive example of how career paths in a professional services organisation are defined and the success criteria for progression. In both cases I will give you the insider's view and my own rules and tips for success, accumulated over many years in blue chip international corporations.

Date: 22/07/2016
Time: 16:00
Location: LB252

The potential for using artificial intelligence techniques to improve e-Learning systems

2016-04-06T17:40:11+01:00

There has been significant progress in the development of techniques to deliver more effective e-Learning systems in both education and commerce but there are very few examples of comprehensive learning systems that exploit contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. We have surveyed existing intelligent learning/training systems and explored the contemporary AI techniques which appear to offer the most promising contributions to e-Learning. With the convergence of several of the required components for success increasingly in place the opportunity to make progress now appears to be much stronger.

In the field of education, the mining, extraction and exploitation of useful information and patterns from student data provides lecturers, trainers and organisations with the potential to tailor learning paths and materials to maximize teaching efficiency and to predict and influence student success rates. Progress in the area of student data analytics can provide useful techniques for exploitation in the development of adaptive learning systems. Student data often includes a combination of nominal and numeric data. A large variety of techniques are available to analyse numeric data, however there are fewer techniques applicable to nominal data. We have explored potential correlations between student attributes in a freely available data set, including the application of what we believe to be a novel technique to analyse nominal data, providing the opportunity to focus on promising correlations for deeper analysis.

Date: 8/04/2016
Time: 16:00
Location: LB252