Call for Papers

Important Dates

  • Submission: May 5, 2021, end of day (anywhere-on-earth time).

  • Notification: May 25, 2021

  • Workshop: Held virtually on August 17, 2021

Call for Papers

We seek papers that present cohesive contributions or works in progress related to the following topics in machine learning, game theory, and/or computer vision for sports analytics; we particularly welcome papers targeting topics at the intersection of multiple of these fields. In terms of application domains, papers should be focused on the analysis of sports (e.g., football, basketball, hockey, baseball, tennis, swimming, running). Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Representation learning and aggregate statistics

    • Player and team-level statistics, vectors, and/or learned embeddings for analysis of in-game situations

    • Modeling and learning of player/team rankings, strengths, and weaknesses

    • Data processing, filtering, and visualisation techniques/demos

  • Evaluation of actions, trajectories and strategies, and learning of optimal policies

    • Value estimation during in-game situations (e.g., action-values for actions and players)

    • Detection and optimization of in-game tactics

    • Reinforcement learning for sports analytics

  • Game-theoretic and multi-agent aspects

    • Predictive and prescriptive analysis of set pieces and in-game play

    • Learning of coordination of player and team behaviors

    • Transfer and imitation learning of human play

    • Synergy or “chemistry” of groups of players

  • Physical and human factors

    • Physics-simulation of real play

    • Human factors such as injury and fatigue predictions

  • Video-based modeling

    • Event detection and activity recognition

    • Pose detection

    • Generative modeling of video data


We invite authors to submit one of two types of papers:

  • Research papers on new findings, maximum 6 pages (excluding references) in IJCAI double column format, which will be reviewed by our program committee, and will be presented as talks and/or posters.

  • Extended abstracts summarizing previously published/submitted work, maximum 2 pages (excluding references) in IJCAI double column format. These works will undergo a light-touch review/check by the organizing committee, and will be presented in the poster session.

Submission instructions: