FCS News

Originally shared on the Institute for Big Data Analytics website.

A team of 3 students from the Institute for Big Data Analytics have walked away with the prize of the "Most Innovative Use of Big Data", and a cheque for $800 from the Sports Hack 2015 competition, held Nov 27-29th in Vancouver, Toronto and Halifax and sponsored by a range of big name tech companies, universities and the CFL.  Forty-one teams competed in the challenge to produce an app to encourage fan engagement using datasets from the CFL.  Our team created an app that tracked the Tweets of CFL fans providing them with rankings of their activity levels and a points system to reward their activity and their participation in mini-games about the football matches, making use of both machine learning techniques and sentiment analysis.  The app could also provide CFL organizations with information about their fans activities and locations and provide the opportunity to advertize to fans, to convert fan points into merchandise of the organizations or their sponsors.  It would be fan-centric rather than team-centric .  The contest was a big challenge, given the hard work, the lack of sleep, and the tight competition.

Gurcan Gercek, Parsa Sarshar and Behrouz Haji Soleimani

Gurcan Gercek, Parsa Sarshar and Behrouz Haji Soleimani