Symposium on AI and Sports

About the Event
The Columbia-Dream Sports AI Innovation Center was founded with the mission to push boundaries at the intersection of AI and Sports. The 2024 Symposium on AI and Sports explored how researchers are tackling challenges in the field, and what’s on the horizon.
Missed the Symposium? Watch the Recordings on YouTube.
Agenda
9:00 AM | Breakfast & Event Registration
10:00 AM | Introductory Remarks [Watch the Recording]
Vishal Misra, Center Director, Professor of Computer Science, & Vice Dean for Computing and AI, Columbia Engineering
Shih-Fu Chang, Dean, Columbia Engineering and Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor
10:05 AM | Panel Discussion: Data Science and Analytics in Sports Performance and Management [Watch the Recording]
Jill McNitt-Gray, Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, USC
Mark Broadie, Professor, Columbia Business School
Scott Powers, Assistant Professor of Sports Analytics, Rice University
Natalie Kupperman, Assistant Professor of Data Science, University of Virginia
Moderated by Sunil Gulati, Michael K. Dakolias Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Economics, Columbia University
11:30 AM | Lightning Talks [Watch the Recording]
Columbia-Dream Sports AI Innovation Center Fellowship & Research Award Recipients
- Shipra Agrawal | Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Contest Design and Catalogue Optimization
- Saeyoung Rho | Designing Causal Inference Tools for Individual Level Time Series Panel Datasets
- Priyank Agarwal | Foundations and Applications of Reinforcement Learning
- Vineet Goyal and Will Ma | Dynamic State Dependent Catalog Optimization Approach for Contest Generation
12:00 PM | Lunch & Networking
1:00 PM | Fireside Chat on AI and Sports
Krishna Bhagavathula, Chief Technology Officer, NBA
Vishal Misra, Center Director, Professor of Computer Science, & Vice Dean for Computing and AI, Columbia Engineering
1:45 PM | Lightning Talks [Watch the Recording
Columbia-Dream Sports AI Innovation Center Fellowship & Research Award Recipients
- Sunil Agrawal | Accelerating Motor Learning and Skills Acquisition in Sports Using Robotics
- Juan Nathaniel | Deep Discovery of Chaotic Systems with Reinforcement Learning
- Parth Gami | Monitoring Cardiovascular Health in Athletes during Exercise with Ultrasound
- Henry Lam and Vineet Goyal | User Behavior Modeling via AI-Optimization Integration
2:15 PM | Panel Discussion: The Future of Sports Technology and Fan Engagement [Watch the Recording]
Amit Sharma, Chief Technology Officer, Dream Sports
Brett Abarbanel, Executive Director of the UNLV International Gaming Institute, & Associate Professor, UNLV
Christina Chase, Managing Director, MIT Sports Lab
Jorge Ortiz, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rutgers University; AI Team Lead, Baseball Operations, New York Yankees
Moderated By Scott Rosner, Professor of Professional Practice, Sports Management; Program Director, M.S. in Sports Management, Columbia School of Professional Studies
4:00 PM | Symposium Adjourns
About the Speakers
Amit Sharma is the Chief Technology Officer of Dream Sports.
Brett Abarbanel, Ph.D. is Executive Director at the UNLV International Gaming Institute and Associate Professor in the UNLV William F. Harrah College of Hospitality, with an affiliate position at the University of Sydney Science, Brain, & Mind Centre in the School of Psychology. Her academic work covers video games, esports and gambling; sports betting; operations and technology; and responsible gambling and community relations. Dr. Abarbanel sits on numerous boards and committees for industry, government, and non-profit organizations, including service as a founding advisory board member of Deutsche Stiftung Glücksspielforschung, and editorial board member of International Gambling Studies and Harvard University’s Brief Addiction Science Information Source. She is a founding director of the Nevada Esports Alliance, which promotes development of best practices in the esports and regulated gambling industries, and an inaugural member of the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s Esports Technical Advisory Committee. Dr. Abarbanel received her Sc.B. from Brown University and her M.S. and Ph.D. from University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Christina Chase is Managing Director and co-founder of the MIT Sports Lab which works with professional teams, global brands, and elite sports organizations to tackle key questions at the intersection of data, sport and engineering. She holds two appointments in MIT’s School of Engineering where she teaches Sports Technology and Innovation & Entrepreneurship. Before this she was the first Entrepreneur in Residence at MIT where she helped hundreds of founders go from concept to company. Christina is a Techstars mentor and has judged for the SXSW Accelerator Competition where she was a member of the Advisory Board. Christina is a former cyclist, selected by the US Cycling Federation to train at the US Olympic Training Center. She has taught downhill skiing in Colorado, summited six of Colorado’s 14-ers across seasons, and her latest sport is kiteboarding.
Henry Lam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. His research focuses on data-driven decision-making via methodologies from simulation modeling and optimization under uncertainty. His works have been recognized by venues such as the NSF CAREER Award and NSA Young Investigator Award, funding awards from industry such as Google, Adobe and JPMorgan, and other paper awards. He serves on the editorial boards of several flagship journals in operations research, including Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and as the Area Editor in Stochastic Models and Data Science in Operations Research Letters. Henry holds a PhD degree in statistics from Harvard University and BS degree in actuarial science from the University of Hong Kong.
Dr. Jill McNitt-Gray PhD FNAK FISB FASB is a Professor in the Departments Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California. She is also the Director of the USC Biomechanics Research Laboratory and is the founding Director of the Integrative and Evolutionary Biology Graduate Program. This interdisciplinary program targets emerging areas at the interface of genomics, evolution, and physiology, and fosters a collective ability to transcend levels of analysis in the area of the life sciences. McNitt-Gray earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics and statistics and received a certification in coaching from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio while competing as a scholarship athlete on the intercollegiate field hockey and gymnastics teams. After working as a Load Research/Load Management for American Electric Power Corporation and coaching at the middle school and high school levels, she returned to graduate school and studied biomechanics at University of North Carolina and Pennsylvania State University. McNitt-Gray has integrated her background in athletics, mathematics, kinesiology, physical therapy, neuromuscular control, and mechanical engineering and specializes in the area of control and dynamics of human movement. She has also served as a biomechanics consultant for the International Olympic Committee, the US Olympic Committee, US Diving, USA Track and Field, USA Gymnastics, US Volleyball Association, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. She has also led research projects sponsored by the IOC Medical Commission as part of the Olympic Games in Atlanta and Sydney, Australia. She is currently translating her research to populations with varied neuromuscular control capabilities including those associated with spinal cord injury and aging.
Jorge Ortiz is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University. His expertise lies in Sensing Systems, Interaction, and Multimodal Learning within heterogeneous, densely sensed environments. Dr. Ortiz serves as a Principal Investigator on the recently awarded $26 million NSF Engineering Research Center, the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3), which focuses on advancing multimodal inference in outdoor environments. Prior to his academic role at Rutgers, he was a research staff member at IBM Research, where he attained over a dozen patents in Machine Learning-based IoT Systems. Dr. Ortiz earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010 and 2013, respectively, and received his B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003. He was also an early employee and kernel contributor to Spire Global.
Juan is a PhD student in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, in the lab of Prof. Pierre Gentine. He received his B.S. in Environmental Science from the National University of Singapore. He is interested in hybrid machine learning approaches to efficiently learn, distill, and characterize invariant physical processes of complex climate dynamics from sparse and incomplete observations.
As EVP & Chief Technology Officer for the NBA, Krishna Bhagavathula is responsible for setting the NBA’s technology strategy and ensuring alignment with the league’s objectives. He leads tech teams that deliver best-in-class applications, systems/cloud infrastructure, courtside technology, and workplace experiences.
Since joining the NBA in 2017, Krishna and his team have executed significant digital transformation efforts including cutting-edge initiatives that have contributed to business growth, operational efficiency, and a culture of innovation. Most recently, the NBA launched a new app/streaming experience that generated over a Billion Video Views, resulting in a 50% increase in subscriptions and 52% increase in viewership in its first year. In addition, his team has been instrumental in creating high-speed arena networks, deploying cloud-based consumer/enterprise infrastructure, developing fan-facing data engineering teams focused on leveraging AI/ML to boost engagement, harnessing the power of analytics to improve player performance and officiating accuracy, and driving self-service employee workflows through automation.
Prior to joining the NBA, Krishna served as Chief Technology Officer for NBC News Digital, where he oversaw technology teams focused on web, mobile and OTT platforms/products for NBCNews.com, MSNBC and shows including TODAY, Nightly News and Meet The Press. Before joining NBC News in 2013, he spent more than eight years at WebMD, most significantly as Vice President of Engineering, where he led development teams responsible for WebMD’s Internet properties, mobile applications, content management and search/discovery platforms. Krishna has also held management consulting positions with BearingPoint, IBM, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, after starting his career as a software engineer developing mobile network provisioning systems. He has extensive experience driving strategic and transformational digital initiatives that have deep organizational impact, as well as delivering business and technology solutions across a wide range of companies ranging from startups to multi-billion-dollar corporations.
A frequent speaker and panelist at industry conferences and events, Krishna serves on the advisory boards of several CTO/CIO consortiums, startups and executive committees. He has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and lives in Princeton, N.J., with his wife and two daughters.
Professor Broadie is the Carson Family Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, where he currently teaches the elective courses Security Pricing: Models and Computation, Computational Finance, and Programming for Business Research. He is an Academic Advisory Board Member for the Program for Financial Studies. His research interests include the pricing of derivative securities, risk management and, more generally, quantitative methods for decision-making under uncertainty. Broadie is the financial engineering area editor of Operations Research and serves on the editorial boards of Finance and Stochastics, SIAM Journal of Financial Mathematics and Computational Management Science and was previously editor-in-chief of the Journal of Computational Finance. Professor Broadie received two Dean's awards for teaching and has given seminars and courses for financial professionals throughout the world. He is the vice chairman of Enterprise Risk Management Institute International (ERM-II), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting education, research and training of enterprise risk managers. He has served as a consultant for a number of financial firms.
Kupperman is an Assistant Professor of Data Science at University of Virginia. She is an applied sports science researcher and certified athletic trainer. She studies the use of biometrics, wearables, and other athlete monitoring methods to reduce injury risk and optimize athletic performance. Prior to joining the School of Data Science faculty in 2022, Kupperman was a Ph.D. student in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Virginia where she did research in the Exercise and Sport Injury Lab and athletics with the men’s basketball team and women’s volleyball team. Before her doctoral studies, she spent seven years at Northwestern University working clinically as an athletic trainer in Athletics and the University Health Service.
Parth Gami is a 4th year PhD candidate in biomedical engineering working in Dr. Elisa Konofagou's laboratory at Columbia University. Parth's main focus is the development of a noninvasive, ultrasound-based technique known as Pulse Wave Imaging (PWI) for the early detection and monitoring of vascular diseases. Over the last three years, Parth has worked on translating the PWI technique into wearable ultrasound applications and investigated the technique's ability to differentiate between disease types, including hypertension and carotid atherosclerosis.
Priyank Agrawal is a fourth-year doctoral student advised by IEOR faculty Shipra Agrawal at Columbia University. His research interests are broadly in theoretical online reinforcement learning and modeling strategic human behavior. He also holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
Saeyoung Rho is a PhD candidate at Columbia University, Department of Computer Science. Her research focuses on designing tools to facilitate causal inference. She is also concerned about the privacy and fairness of machine learning algorithms and their impact on the real world.
Scott Powers joined the Department of Sport Management at Rice University as an Assistant Professor in Sport Analytics in 2023. He completed his PhD in Statistics at Stanford University in 2017. From there, he worked for the Los Angeles Dodgers in R&D for five years and then spent one season as an Assistant General Manager with the Houston Astros. Along the way, he has held multiple-year consulting engagements with the Oakland Athletics (baseball), AZ Alkmaar (soccer) and Zelus Analytics (baseball and soccer).
As director of the Master of Science in Sports Management program, Scott Rosner leads all programmatic and curricular development efforts, creates professional development opportunities for students, and manages all strategic planning efforts for the program, including marketing, enrollment, student life, and alumni affairs. Rosner is also a Professor of Professional Practice, teaching graduate-level courses in the discipline of Sports Management. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia in January 2018, Rosner was a practice professor in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the faculty associate director of the Wharton Sports Business Initiative.
Shih-Fu Chang is Dean of Columbia Engineering and Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor. He leads the education, research, and innovation mission of the School and has greatly contributed to its growth and advancement, propelling it to be one of the top engineering programs in the nation.
As one of the most influential experts in multimedia, computer vision and artificial intelligence, his research has led to development of innovative image search tools, which have been used by major media companies and law enforcement agencies in fighting online human trafficking crimes. He has also launched AI tools for online disinformation detection and attribution.
Dean Chang is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and IEEE, and an elected member of Academia Sinica. He received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Amsterdam and the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates. He is the inaugural director for Columbia Center of AI Technology in collaboration with Amazon. He received his BS from National Taiwan University in 1985 and his PhD from the University of California-Berkeley in 1993.
Shipra Agrawal is an Associate Professor of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. She is also affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and the Data Science Institute. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in June 2011 under the guidance of Prof. Yinyu Ye, and was a researcher at Microsoft Research India from July 2011 to August 2015. Her research spans several areas of optimization and machine learning, including online optimization under uncertainty, multi-armed bandits, online learning, reinforcement learning, and learning in games and auctions. Shipra serves as an associate editor for Management Science, INFORMS Journal on Optimization, and Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). Her research is supported by a Google Faculty research award (2017), Amazon research award (2017), and an NSF CAREER Award.
Sunil K. Agrawal has developed a highly visible interdisciplinary program in rehabilitation robotics at Columbia University. Through a range of innovative designs of robots and clinical studies, Dr. Agrawal has showed that novel training robots can help humans to relearn, restore, or improve functional movements. Dr. 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 US patents.
Sunil Gulati is the Michael P. Dakolias Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Economics at Columbia University. He is the former President of the US Soccer Federation, and has served as President of Kraft Soccer (New England Revolution) and Deputy Commissioner of Major League Soccer. He chairs and/or serves on multiple FIFA and CONCACAF Committees. Additionally, Gulati served on the Board of Directors of the FIFA Women's World Cup USA 1999 and 2003 and is currently a member of the Board for the U. S. Soccer Foundation and the Randall's Island Park Alliance. Gulati graduated Magna Cum Laude from Bucknell University and earned his M. A. and M. Phil. in Economics at Columbia University.
Vineet Goyal is Associate Professor in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at Columbia University where he joined in 2010. He received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization (ACO) from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. Before coming to Columbia, he spent two years as a Postdoctoral Associate at the Operations Research Center at MIT. He is interested in the design of efficient and robust data-driven algorithms for large scale dynamic optimization problems with applications in revenue management and healthcare problems. His research has been continually supported by grants from NSF and industry including NSF CAREER Award in 2014 and faculty research awards from Google, IBM, Adobe and Amazon.
Vishal Misra is the Director of the Columbia-Dream Sports AI Innovation Center, and the Vice Dean of Computing and AI and a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia Engineering. His research is in the broad area of networking. His work includes both developing mechanisms that make networks work better and faster, and also investigating the economic models that underpin the Internet and their impact on public policy like Network Neutrality. His approach to research is to incorporate fundamental theories like control theory, queueing theory, information theory, and game theory in the design and analysis of networks. Misra is also a founding team member of CricInfo, since acquired by ESPN.
Will Ma is the Roderick H. Cushman Associate Professor of Business at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. His research centers around online algorithms in e-commerce systems, both for supply-side problems like inventory and fulfillment, and revenue management problems like dynamic assortment optimization. He specializes in designing simple online algorithms with performance guarantees, that can be tuned to historical data. Will also has miscellaneous experience as a professional poker player, video-game startup founder, and karaoke bar pianist.