NFL taps data science community to help track head impacts

By TIM BOOTH
AP Sports Writer

The NFL is continuing to crowdsource new ways to track head and helmet impacts during games from data scientists and for the second straight year the winner of its artificial intelligence competition comes from outside the United States. The NFL and Amazon Web Services awarded $100,000 in prizes for this year’s competition with the top prize of $50,000 going to Kippei Matsuda from Osaka, Japan, the league announced. The task for Matsuda and the rest of the data scientists who took part was to use artificial intelligence to create models that would detect helmet impacts from NFL game footage and identify the specific players involved in those impacts.