Events

Symposium Highlights

About the Event

Sponsored by Dream Sports, India's foremost sports technology company, the symposium is our flagship annual convening where cutting-edge AI converges with immersive fan experiences, data-driven strategy, performance optimization, computer vision, and biomechanics to redefine the future of sport. The symposium convenes leading researchers, industry leaders, and innovators to explore how AI is transforming the way fans engage, how organizations make strategic decisions, and how technology is reshaping competition and performance across sports.

Hosted by the Columbia–Dream Sports AI Innovation Center, the event highlights breakthrough academic research alongside real-world applications from the global sports industry. Through keynote talks, lightning research sessions, and interactive panels, participants will gain a front-row view of the ideas, tools, and collaborations shaping the next era of sport and entertainment.

Venue

Columbia University Journalism School, Joseph D. Jamail Lecture Hall, Pulitzer Hall, 2950 Broadway New York, NY 10027

Agenda

8:30–9:00 AM | Registration, Check-in, Breakfast

9:00–9:10 AM | Intro & Welcome Remarks Dean Prof. Shih-Fu Chang, Vice Dean of Computing & AI Prof. Vishal Misra; 
Eddie Mandhry, Managing Director, Sports AI Innovation Center

9:10– 10:00 AM | Opening Keynote Prof. Priya Narasimhan, Carnegie Mellon University. Fireside conversation moderated by Prof. Vishal Misra, Vice Dean of Computing & AI

10:00 –11:15 AM | Industry Panel: From Insight to Impact: AI’s Role in Reimagining the Fan Experience & the Business of Sports. 
Moderator: Jahnavi Mehta, TEG Sports NA
Mark Floriani, CEO & Co-Founder, FloSports; Julie Souza, Global Head of Sports, AWS;
Saj Cherian, Chief of Staff, Fanatics Head of Fanatics Ventures; Shripal Shah, Chief Digital Officer, Next League

11:15 –11:45 AM | Coffee Break & Networking World Room

11:45 –12:30 PM | Lightning Talks 1: Sponsored Research Presentations - Prof. Yunzhu Li – Physics-Informed Neural Simulators for Dynamics Modeling in Complex Sports Systems; Parth Gami, Columbia University Ultrasound & Elasticity Imaging Lab – Monitoring Cardiovascular Health in Athletes during Exercise with Ultrasound/PWI

12:30–1:15 PM | Lunch Break & Networking - World Room

1:15–2:00 PM | Industry Fireside: John Nicastro, Chief Technology Officer, MLS, AI as a Competitive Edge: Major League Soccer’s Vision for Intelligent Sport

2:00–2:30 PM | Lightning Talks 2: Sponsored Research Presentations: Prof. Lydia Chilton, Simulating Fan Experiences with Multi-Agent LLMs; Prof. Sunil K. Agrawal

2:30–3:30 PM | Panel: Data Science & Analytics Across Sporting Ecosystems
Moderator: Ilari Paasivirta Dream Sports; Ozan Adiguzel Principal AI Engineer, Finster AI ; Konstantinos Pelechrinis, Prof. Informatics & Network Systems, University of Pittsburgh, Data Analytics Consultant - Dallas Mavericks; Jorge Ortiz
Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rutgers University CV/AI Lead NY Yankees

3:30–4:00 PM | Closing Reflections Prof. Vishal Misra
 

Confirmed Speakers 

Ozan Adıgüzel, Principal AI Engineer, Finster AI (Columbia Alum, MA Statistics) 
Ozan Adıgüzel is a Principal AI Engineer at Finster AI, an AI-native financial research platform. He was previously a Founding AI Engineer at Workmate Labs, an agentic AI startup backed by Kleiner Perkins and OpenAI, and the first AI/ML hire at Own Company, a B2B SaaS firm later acquired by Salesforce. Earlier, he was among the first hires at Zelus Analytics, where he helped build a leading sports intelligence platform adopted by teams across the MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, IPL, European soccer leagues, and PGA TOUR. Zelus was later acquired by Teamworks and now powers professional teams worldwide as Teamworks Intelligence. Ozan holds a bachelor’s in Statistics from Brown University and a master’s in Statistics from Columbia University, where he is currently pursuing a second master’s in Political Science. At Brown, he co-led the Sports Analytics Club, launching an undergraduate research group and a for-credit course in sports analytics. He also interned with the Sacramento Kings and ShotTracker, collaborating with front-office staff, coaches, and players in both NBA and college basketball to support data-driven decision-making.

Sunil K. Agrawal, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Professor of Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine
Prof. Agrawal has active collaborations with faculty in the departments of Neurology, Rehabilitation Medicine, Pediatric Orthopedics, Otolaryngology, Geriatrics, and Psychiatry. A selected list of these ongoing studies are: (i) Perturbation training of the elderly using a Tethered Pelvic Assist Device (TPAD), (ii) Gait training of stroke patients with asymmetric forces, (iii) Balance training of children with cerebral palsy, (iv) Gait characterization of patients with vestibular disorders, (v) Balance Training of Parkinson patients, (vi) Novel neck braces for assistance and training of patients with head drop, (vii) Novel dynamic spine braces for patients with scoliosis. These studies are funded by grants from National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Spinal Cord Injury Research Board, and others. Agrawal received a BS in mechanical engineering from IIT, Kanpur (India) in 1984, a MS degree from Ohio State University in 1986, and a PhD degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, California, in 1990.   He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He is an author of 450 research articles, 3 books, and 13 patents

Saj Cherian, Chief of Staff & Head of Fanatics Ventures, Fanatics
Saj is Chief of Staff and Head of Fanatics Ventures, working closely with CEO Michael Rubin on business development, partnerships, recruiting, capital raising, and investments to build the leading global digital sports platform. As Employee No. 2 at Kynetic, he helped relaunch Fanatics after eBay’s $2.4 billion acquisition of GSI Commerce, raising over $3 billion in capital, recruiting more than 30 senior executives and board members, completing 12 strategic acquisitions, and forging partnerships with every major U.S. professional sports league. He also helped launch the REFORM Alliance and the ALL IN Challenge, two national initiatives addressing criminal justice reform and food insecurity.
Previously, Saj led Kynetic’s push into mobile commerce, drawing on his decade of experience as a venture investor at Valhalla Partners, head of wireless strategy at NBC Universal, operating executive at Virgin Mobile USA, and consultant at McKinsey & Company. A Marshall Scholar, he earned an M.Phil. in European Politics from Oxford and an A.B. in Public and International Affairs from Princeton.
He is a frequent speaker at MIT Sloan’s Sports Analytics Conference and serves on the boards of Candy Digital, Comoto Holdings, the ALL IN Challenge Foundation, and the Association of Marshall Scholars. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he chairs its Committee on Term Membership and has served on its Committee on Corporate Affairs.

Lydia Chilton, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Columbia Engineering
Lydia Chilton is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. She is an early pioneer in decomposing complex tasks so that crowds and computers can solve them together. Her current research is in computational design – how computation and AI can help people with design, innovation and creative problem solving. Applications include: conveying a message within an image for journalism and advertising, developing technology for public libraries, improving risk communication during hurricanes, and helping scientists explain their work on Twitter.

Mark Floreani, CEO, FloSports
Mark Floreani, a former All-American track star at the University of Texas, is the CEO of FloSports. He co-founded the company in 2006 with his brother Martin Floreani and Madhu Venkatesan, filling a need for high quality live broadcasts and original content for underserved sports communities. With just $10,000 and a van, Mark and Martin traveled the country chronicling the best Track & Field and Wrestling events while interviewing athletes for FloSports. That trip kick-started a journey establishing FloSports as a world leading independent sports media company and streaming platform delivering more than 50,000 live events, covering 25 different sports, and reaching more than 1 million subscribers every year.

Yunzhu Li, Assistant Professor, Computer Science 
Yunzhu Li is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia, he was an Assistant Professor at UIUC CS and spent time as a Postdoc at Stanford, collaborating with Fei-Fei Li and Jiajun Wu. Yunzhu earned his PhD from MIT under the guidance of Antonio Torralba and Russ Tedrake. Yunzhu’s work has been recognized with the Best Paper Award at ICRA, the Best Systems Paper Award, and as a Finalist for the Best Paper Award at CoRL. Yunzhu is also the recipient of the AAAI New Faculty Highlights, the Sony Faculty Innovation Award, the Amazon Research Award, the Adobe Research Fellowship, and was selected as the First Place Recipient of the Ernst A. Guillemin Master’s Thesis Award in AI and Decision Making at MIT. His research has been published in top journals and conferences, including Nature and Science, and featured by major media outlets such as CNN, BBC, and The Wall Street Journal.

Eddie Mandhry, Managing Director, Columbia Dream Sports AI Innovation Center
Eddie is the inaugural Managing Director of Columbia Dream Sports AI Innovation Center, where he oversees transformative initiatives at the intersection of artificial intelligence and sports innovation. The Center is catalyzing the deployment of AI and advanced analytics to revolutionize sports science. Prior to joining Columbia Engineering, he was a Senior Fellow at Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, where he built the Virtual Center for Advanced Potential. His leadership experience includes serving as Director for Africa & the Middle East at Yale University, where he spearheaded the president’s Africa Initiative, as Associate Director at NYU's Africa House and the Abu Dhabi Center for Technology & Economic Development, and as Managing Director of Global Kids in Washington, D.C.Eddie also serves as a trustee of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and Hampshire College. He holds a master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics, a BA in Political Science from Hampshire College, and executive training in AI and Machine Learning from MIT, social enterprise management from Columbia Business School, and public leadership from Harvard Kennedy School. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jahnavi Mehta, PM, TEG Sport North America
Jahnavi is a Project Manager at TEG Sport North America, where she supports the strategic coordination and execution of major sports events. Her young career spans key roles at Major League Soccer and the ICC T20 World Cup USA, experiences that have given her a broad base of skills across marketing, partnerships, and operations. She holds both a B.A. in Art History and a Master’s in Sports Management from Columbia University.Beyond her professional work, Jahnavi is closely connected to global cricket as her family are co-owners of the Knight Riders franchise group, which operates teams in the Indian Premier League (IPL), Major League Cricket (MLC), and other T20 competitions worldwide.

Vishal Misra, RKS Family Professor of Computer Science, Vice Dean of Computing and AI, Columbia Engineering; Faculty Director, Columbia–Dream Sports AI Innovation Center
Vishal Misra is the RKS Family Professor of Computer Science and Vice Dean of Computing and AI at Columbia Engineering, and serves as the Faculty Director of the Columbia–Dream Sports AI Innovation Center. His research focuses on the modeling and analysis of complex systems. His work includes both developing mechanisms that make networks work better and faster, and investigating the economic models that underpin the Internet and their impact on public policy like Network Neutrality. His approach to research incorporates fundamental theories such as control theory, queueing theory, information theory, and game theory in the design and analysis of networks.
Vishal has worked extensively in the design and analysis of congestion control mechanisms for both the Internet and data centers. His work, based on applying classical control theory to a differential equation-based model he developed for Internet traffic, has become part of the DOCSIS 3.1 standard for cable modems and is being deployed worldwide. He has also played a very active role in public policy debates related to Network Neutrality, with strong regulations passed by Indian and Canadian authorities reflecting a definition he proposed.
He received a BTech from IIT Bombay in 1992, and an MS and PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996 and 2000 respectively. He is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM, and has received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Bombay (2019) and a Distinguished Young Alumnus Award from UMass-Amherst College of Engineering (2014).

John Nicastro, Chief Technology Officer, Major League Soccer
John Nicastro is the Chief Technology Officer for Major League Soccer (MLS) and Soccer United Marketing, where he oversees the League’s technology, data, and AI strategy. His portfolio spans sport and fan technology, business solutions, information technology and security, and MLS’s owned digital platforms. Prior to joining MLS, John served as Head of the Enterprise Data Office at SiriusXM and Pandora, leading teams that powered AI and advanced data services for more than 150 million audio listeners. He has also held senior leadership roles at CA Technologies (now Broadcom Inc.) and Cablevision Systems.
With more than two decades of experience, John holds multiple patents in data, artificial intelligence, and network engineering, and has been recognized with honors including the CIO 100 and the Analytics 50. He is an active Governing Member of the New York Chief Data Officer Board and IBM’s Media & Entertainment Leaders Exchange, and frequently contributes as a guest lecturer and panelist, most recently at NYU’s inaugural Executive AI Masterclass.
John earned his MBA from Colorado State University, is a graduate of the New York Institute of Technology, and studied at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

Priya Narasimhan, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University
Priya Narasimhan is a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests lie in dependable distributed systems, fault-tolerance, embedded systems, mobile systems, and sports technology. She serves as the academic lead of the Intel Science and Technology Center in Embedded Computing (ISTC-EC), which comprises Carnegie Mellon, Penn State, UIUC, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, UC Berkeley, and Georgia Tech.
Priya is also the CEO and Founder of YinzCam, Inc., a Carnegie Mellon spin-off company that has focused for the last 16 years on building the mobile apps, websites, augmented-reality experiences, loyalty programs, and customer data platforms for sports, YinzCam works with 160+ professional sports teams across the world, including clubs in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, Premier League, Championship, venues, and more.

Jorge Ortiz, Associate Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rutgers University/ CV/AI Lead, NY Yankees
Jorge is also Director of the Sensing and Reasoning Lab. His research advances sense-making in sensor-rich environments through multimodal machine learning, generative models, and large language models. He previously worked at IBM Research and several startups applying ML to IoT. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and a BS from MIT. Currently, he also serves as Quantitative Analyst and CV/AI Lead for the New York Yankees, applying advanced analytics and computer vision to baseball operations.

Kostas Pelechrinis, Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh, Analytics Consultant - Dallas Mavericks
Konstantinos Pelechrinis is an Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Riverside. He is a recipient of the Army Young Investigator Award for his work on complex networks, while his research is also supported by the National Science Foundation. His work has been featured in media outlets including The New York Times, NPR, Boston Globe, Bloomberg CityLab, The Ringer, and WTAE. He is the co-author of Mathletics: How Gamblers, Managers and Fans Use Mathematics in Sports and has served as a long-time analytics consultant for the Dallas Mavericks.

Shripal Shah, Chief Digital Officer, Next League
Shripal drives emerging technology and innovation strategies to help sports organizations scale revenue, fan engagement, and digital transformation.
He was most recently Chief Digital Officer at Shop Your Way (SYW), where he spearheaded a comprehensive digital transformation that revolutionized the retail loyalty space. While SVP, Chief Strategy Officer with the Washington Commanders, Shah transformed the team's digital business, generating $60M+ in sponsorship revenue and designing a 120K+ member loyalty program. A recognized thought leader in AI and sports technology, Shah has authored three influential books: Leveling Up with AI: A Strategic Guide to AI in Sports Marketing, The Art of Victory: Generative AI and the New Frontier of Global Sports, and Unlocking Fan Loyalty: From Frequent Flyers to Fanatics in the Age of AI. His widely-read AI Playbook column for John Wall Street is considered a definitive resource for AI innovation in the sports business. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University.

Julie Souza, Global Head of Sports, AWS
Julie Souza leads sports strategy globally for AWS, driving innovation in sports data, virtualized production and distribution, fan data and analytics, generative AI, and more. Prior to joining AWS, Julie led Strategy and Business Development for Second Spectrum, a pioneer in sports data and analytics. She held similar roles leading business development and driving strategy for ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and CBS Sports Network. Julie holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Harvard Business School.