SciSports participated in this year’s edition of the Barça Sports Tech week, which took place in Auditorium 1899 near the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona from Tuesday November 12th till Friday November 15th. Our Chief Product & Technology Officer Jan Van Haaren was invited as a keynote speaker at the Barça Sports Analytics Summit and served on the expert panel.
Two weeks ago, hundreds of sports professionals gathered in Barcelona for the fifth Barça Sports Tech Week. The Barça Football Coach Summit on Tuesday featured a number of high-profile coaches such as Jagoba Arrasate (Osasuna) and Nenad Bjelica (Dinamo Zagreb) who shared their experiences. The Barça Sports Analytics Summit on Wednesday included a research-paper competition alongside a number of keynote speakers, including SciSports’ CPTO Jan Van Haaren and Benfica’s Head of Sports Data Science Suds Gopaladesikan. The Barça Sports Tech Week on Thursday and Friday consisted of a number of panel sessions discussing different areas in which sports and technology come together. SciSports was well represented at the Barça Sports Tech week with Chief Product & Technology Officer Jan Van Haaren, Senior Machine Learning Engineer Robert Seidl and Country Manager Simon Rödder.
SciSports most actively participated in the Barça Sports Analytics Summit with Jan Van Haaren appearing on stage three times. In the morning, he was invited to stage with his fellow contributors to the first Barça Football Analytics Guide. In the early afternoon, Jan presented SciSports’ cutting-edge football analytics research in his keynote talk titled Scouting Football Players by Squeezing Every Last Drop out of Match Event Data. In the late afternoon, SciSports’ CPTO appeared on the expert panel alongside fellow keynote speakers Suds Gopaladesikan (Head of Sports Data Science at SL Benfica), Dan Cervone (Principal Data Scientist at Zelus Analytics) and Sergio Llana Pérez (Data Scientist at FC Barcelona), and moderator Javier Fernández (Head of Sports Analytics at FC Barcelona).