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Make Data Work
March 5–6, 2018: Training
March 6–8, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
San Jose, CA

What is the relationship between social influence and the NBA?

Noah Gift (UC Davis)
11:00am–11:30am Tuesday, March 6, 2018
Data science and machine learning, Media, entertainment, and advertising
 Location: LL20 B
Download slides (PDF)

As the first technical employee and CTO of Sqor Sports, Noah Gift discovers how social media influences the NBA and vice versa. As a result, Sqor Sports has been able to grow to millions of monthly active users by leveraging influencers that were found by machine learning algorithms.

Noah shares his research and lessons learned on how social media and the NBA intersect and explains how Sqor Sports uses data science and machine learning to determine NBA team valuation and attendance as well as individual player performance. You’ll learn how to recreate this research, working with a set of shared Juypter notebooks.

Topics include:

  • What drives the valuation of teams (attendance, the local real estate market, etc.)?
  • Does winning bring more fans to games?
  • Does salary correlate with social media performance?

For more information, check out “Social power, influence, and performance in the NBA: Part 1” and “Part 2” from IBM developerWorks.

Photo of Noah Gift

Noah Gift

UC Davis

Noah Gift is consulting CTO and lecturer at UC Davis. An adaptable technical leader, entrepreneur, software developer, architect, and engineer with over 20 years’ experience in leadership and engineering (including P&L responsibility), over the past eight years, Noah has shipped than 10 new products at multiple companies that generated millions of dollars of revenue and had global scale. Previously, Noah helped build Sqor Sports from scratch, creating the company’s first product and hiring and managing all employees. He has also written production machine learning models in Python and R. Noah is the author of the forthcoming book Pragmatic AI: An Introduction to Cloud-Based Machine Learning as well as a number of articles.