Keeping Players on the Pitch: What Data Can Catch Before an Injury Does
In the 2014 World Cup quarterfinal, Brazil’s best player took a knee into his lower back and fractured a vertebra. Neymar was out for the rest of the tournament. Two days later his teammates walked onto the field for the semifinal having just watched it happen, and lost 7-1 to Germany, one of the most […]
How AI Helps World Cup Teams Find the Players Everyone Else Missed
For a club scout, the question is almost limitless: who can we buy? For a national team scout, the question is stranger and much narrower: who is ours? Finn McCallum, the player and coach I have been interviewing throughout this series, corrected me on that point the first time I asked how scouting works at […]
Can AI and Machine Learning Predict the World Cup Winner?
In November 2022, Argentina walked into their World Cup opener on a 36-game unbeaten streak and lost 2-1 to Saudi Arabia, a team one AI model gave a 0.06% chance of winning the tournament. Saudi Arabia took three shots the entire game, and the only two on target both went in. Three weeks later, Argentina won the World Cup. […]
FIFA World Cup 2026: How Machine Learning and AI Are Changing the Beautiful Game
In the summer of 2014, Brazil hosted the World Cup on home soil. They were the obvious favorites. The crowd in Belo Horizonte was there to watch them win. Instead, Germany scored four goals in six minutes and walked off the pitch with a 7-1 result that still doesn’t make sense twelve years later. Unless […]
How Lionsgate Revealed the Limits of Fine-Tuning in Machine Learning
In September 2024, Lionsgate announced a partnership with AI video company Runway to fine-tune a machine learning model on the studio’s catalog of more than 20,000 film and television titles. The studio’s vice chair expected to save “millions and millions of dollars.” A year later, the project had hit a wall. The reason, according to […]
Machine Learning in Healthcare: AI Scribes and Heart Disease Screening
How ambient AI scribes turn doctor-patient conversations into clinical notes, and how a University of Michigan model detects hidden heart disease from a 10-second EKG.
Machine Learning in the NBA: Player Tracking and Injury Prevention
Every NBA arena has cameras mounted in the catwalks that track every player and the ball at 25 frames per second. Machine learning in the NBA turns that tracking data into pregame scouting reports, real-time broadcast graphics, and the injury prevention models that decide whether a player sits out practice. NBA Player Tracking Technology From […]
Strike Zone Prediction Model: How Neural Networks Analyze MLB Statcast Data
Baseball has always been a numbers game. Batting averages, earned run averages, and RBIs have been part of the sport for over a century. But since 2015, MLB Statcast and machine learning have pushed that much further. Statcast now generates up to seven terabytes of data per game, and ML models turn that raw data […]
How Formula 1 Teams Use Machine Learning to Win Races
In Formula 1, milliseconds decide races. The cars generate massive amounts of data, around 400 GB per race from sensors tracking aerodynamics, fuel usage, tire wear, and driver behavior. Add in data from simulators and previous races, and no human team can analyze it all in real time. That’s where machine learning comes in. And […]
Machine Learning in Sports: How AI Predicts NFL Tackles
This is the first post in the “ML in the Wild” series, where we look at specific machine learning applications in the real world. We’re starting with one football fans might recognize: the tackle probability statistics that appear during NFL broadcasts. What AWS Built The NFL partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a […]