Sada Insight: AI system for sport media and events launched

               Staff Reporter


An artificial intelligence (AI) technology and data system aimed at providing ultrafast AI-based sentiment analysis, search, statistics and alerts on various aspects of a mega event like the FIFA World Cup was launched yesterday at The Pearl-Qatar.
 ‘Sada (meaning ‘echo’ in Arabic) Insight: AI for Sports Media and Events’ was borne out of a research project about ‘Sentiment Analysis on FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Using Artificial Intelligence and Twitter’ by Hamad Bin Khalifa University College of Science and Engineering associate professor Dr James She, Dr Kamilla Swart and their teams at HBKU.
Swart initiated the 2010 FIFA World Cup Research Agenda and has been part of several research initiatives that aim to enhance knowledge of mega sporting events in the Middle East and North Africa region, and Qatar in particular. According to the organisers, this project was initially funded by the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy and CyPhy Limited, and later on collaborated with Michael Linley, Victoria University, and Qatar University’s College of Business and Economics assistant professor Dr Othman al-Thawadi.
Dr She, also the project lead, said “the unique capabilities of our AI technologies and Data system – Sada, developed in this project, are the ultrafast access and continuous insights about the sentiments for different aspects of a mega sports event by analysing the growing amount and complex content of tweets.
“So far, over 1mn tweets highly relevant to the World Cup event, as the first in the community, are collected and analysed. The AI system, Sada, will collect more highly-related tweets every day, and then continuously analyse and report the sentiments of the identified concepts and keywords from newly accumulated tweets containing text, emoji or even user shared images later on using advanced machine learning techniques and system technologies.”
As such, media channels, reporters, organisers, and individual professionals could get a nearly real-time summary and timely ideas about wide-ranging topics and incidents perceived by the public about a sport event. Organisers noted that social media remains a key source for retrieving public sentiment, citing Twitter as one of the most popular platforms for social media. More than 400mn tweets are posted daily and more than half a billion tweets were obtained in the previous World Cup.
This large dataset allows the public reaction to an event like the World Cup to be analysed, providing information on public perceptions and attitudes. This research investigates the relationship between the sentiment based on Twitter tweets and the World Cup 2022, organisers said.
“These tweets are only collected with the relevant hashtags or keywords about the World Cup 2022 in Qatar. Through our AI and data-driven Sada system and the derived methodologies, we discovered the sentiments and fun facts of some features important to the sentiments about the period before the World Cup.
“The result shows that people are positive about the upcoming World Cup. Other breakthroughs and powerful features of the Sada system include the intelligent analysis of social media languages, daily mobile alerts, and summarised insight of total and daily tweet amount, average sentiment, and smart information visualisation,” the organisers added.
Al-Thawadi underlined the capability of the Sada system and its generated insight to assist with better management and decision-making across all phases of event bidding, planning, and implementation. “Moreover, Sada system and the produced insight has applicability across different types and sizes of special events, ranging from sport to even non-sport, mega and annual sport events.
“The initial groundwork of this project was a legacy of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and the 2022 FIFA World Cup has presented an opportunity to evolve the analysis of public sentiment using AI technologies and massive data from social media that can provide real-time insights in order to create smarter events,” he noted.
Dr Swart said that for future work, the collaborative project team will investigate the public sentiments by advancing novel AI, data, and system technologies from HBKU to help discover other key aspects or even predict the golden ball winner of this World Cup.
“For example, football players’ sentiment could reflect their on-field performances, and the higher the sentiment could help us to track and predict the winner. Since many tweets can involve complicated sentences, and even contain trending multimedia content like emojis, images, or even video, the involved AI technologies, system, and methodologies in Sada is envisioned to provide much more accurate and earlier insight about the public’s sentiments of any mega sports event faster than hearing your sound echo,” she said.