Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-31 01:01:31|Editor: yan

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RIYADH, March 30 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of computer programmers, developers and tech heads took part on Friday in Dawri Thakaa, the first sports-related Artificial Intelligence hackathon in Saudi Arabia.

The event comes on the heels of the Kingdom making AI a national priority as a key enabler in realizing many ambitious transformation programs.

At the one-day Dawri Thakaa, which took place in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, 150 teams of programmers and data scientists competed to develop AI models that can predict the results of the upcoming matches in the Prince Mohammed Bin Salman Cup League for football (soccer).

"The Thakaa hackathon tournament is the first-time technological sports hackathon using AI techniques designed specifically to discover the skills of amateurs and specialists in AI," the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones (SAFCSP) said in a statement.

The competing teams were given 12 hours to build their AI models. The teams then submitted their models and their predictions for the 44 remaining league games. No changes to the submissions are allowed afterwards.

Then, each week following the completion of the soccer games, the hackathon teams' leaderboard will be published and updated, based on the teams with the most accurate predictions.

At the end of the final football game in May, the top three teams will be announced during the awards ceremony for the Prince Mohammed Bin Salman Cup League for football (soccer).

A study on the predictions for the English Football League published by Imperial College London described an AI model with a 52 percent prediction accuracy, according to Dawri Thakaa organizers.

"In similar efforts for this hackathon, competing teams will analyze large datasets containing information on match outcomes, team scores, individual players and many other data points gathered from previous soccer matches of the Saudi league. Then, data scientists will figure out which factors may affect future matches using Machine Learning techniques," the organizers added.

Abdullah Sharaf Al Ghamdi, the chief executive of SAFCSP, stated that Dawri Thakaa is a hackathon that intends to harness the talents, in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence, of the human capital of Saudi Arabia.

"It encourages the participants to apply their knowledge, experience, and expertise to devise a model to predict the results of the soccer matches. This event also aims to motivate the new generation to invest in learning new technologies leading to innovative and successful startups," he added.