Left to right: Yuval Ben Zion, Gilad Keizler and Nimrod Shalit at ICAMES in Istanbul (Courtesy)
Gilad Keizler, Yuval Ben Zion and Nimrod Shalit’s final project in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at BGU has garnered second place at the ICAMES conference.
The international competition, which has been held in Istanbul for the last 20 years, features dozens of student teams from around the world from different engineering disciplines. Keizler, Ben-Zion and Shalit’s project, under the supervision of Dr. Adir Even, was the only one from Israel to be accepted.
The StaTeam system provides a comprehensive ICT-based solution for basketball teams. The system is based on a mobile application for efficient data collection and storage during games. It also provides a variety of Business Intelligence (BI) utilities for analyzing and visualizing the data collected over time. The BI utilities provide the coach with decision support tools toward improving the performance of individual players, as well as the entire team. The use of statistics can make the difference between a good team and an excellent one. Consequently, many statistics and BI companies have entered this field, offering complex and pricey solutions that only professional teams can afford. However, the use of statistics and analysis is limited in low-budget teams due to lack of resources and the scarcity of affordable and useful systems on the market. StaTeam will be offered as a more reasonably priced alternative service.
The system consists of three main components: a) Data collection: an Android mobile application designed for interactive data collection during games. The application offers an intuitive graphic user interface (GUI), designed to support intensive data collection, while presenting an attractive yet professional user experience. Moreover, it includes real-time BI features that present some basic statistics based on recently-collected data, toward supporting the coach's decisional needs during the game. b) The data visualization and analysis:a Tableau-based BI system that lets coaches and players view and analyze the collected data from all games in a convenient manner. The BI system offers a broad variety of BI tools, tailored to address the needs of basketball-team training, as well as data analysis capabilities that help discover hidden patterns. c) Data management: The main motivation behind the StaTeam system is the ability to collect and analyze data effectively; hence, the need for a powerful data management infrastructure. That includes a cloud-based relational database for storing raw data on teams, players, and different actions during games; ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) mechanisms that prepares the raw data for convenient analysis; and an On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube that improves query and analysis performance with the transformed data.
The implementation of all systems components was completed successfully, and StaTeam is currently implemented for evaluation with a local basketball team.
