DINS associate professor Dr. Konstantinos Pelechrinis is co-PI of a $1.1 Million grant from the NSF titled “Building a sustainable national network for developing and disseminating Sports Content for Outreach, Research, and Education in data science”. Dr. Pelechrinis continues to utilize sports data to increase data fluency, data literacy, and data science competency amongst a wide population that really needs deep understanding of data for impact in government, education, transportation, healthcare and a myriad of other sectors.
This project funded by NSF's Directorate of Undergraduate Education aims to serve the national interest by exploring approaches to engage and prepare the next generation of data scientists through sports analytics. It is a collaborative effort of five institutions (Carnegie Mellon University, Baylor University, St. Lawrence University, University of Pittsburgh and the United States Military Academy) together with sports industry professionals to create authentic curricular materials. Prof. Rebecca Nugent of CMU is the PI.
The project will create a national network of academic and sports industry partners to develop modules paired with data, code, example problems. All materials will be housed on the Integrated Statistics Learning Environment (ISLE) platform, which will be freely accessible to students and faculty. Industry partners from over 50 sports teams and leagues will work with educators to create authentic modules that will focus on introducing foundational data science topics via sports applications. Resources will be primarily geared towards undergraduate students and will cover a wide array of men’s and women’s sports including baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, cricket and much more. The project will also offer professional development opportunities for faculty and work to engage a diverse collection of institutions and students with an additional goal of broadening participation in the data science workforce.