Research on computer software that would use operational artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze hockey games recently won a best student paper award for a group from Waterloo Engineering.
The work was presented at the third annual Ottawa Hockey Analytics Conference, which was jointly hosted earlier this month by Carleton University in Ottawa and St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.
The winning team included master’s student Helmut Neher and Mehrnaz Fani, a visiting scholar from Shiraz University in Iran, from the Vision and Image Processing Research Group at Waterloo.
Neher and Fani were supervised by systems design engineering professors David Clausi, John Zelek and Alexander Wong.
Part of a major initiative by the research group that is focused on applying deep-learning AI to quantitative sports analytics, the software would process and analyze video of hockey players by recognizing their actions on the ice.
It would then generate data on the performance of players, currently a time-consuming manual process that requires people to watch videos and take notes.