World Cup Predictions - Artificial Intelligence & Human Intelligence
Hi everyone,
Steve Palmer here, former Premier League player, current Qlik devotee and contributor to the Choose your Champion podcast!
Well, when the good people at Qlik asked if i would take part in podcast and if you'll excuse the pun, 'Champion' the Human Intelligence potential in predicting outcomes at the FIFA World Cup, i was a little apprehensive! I think I've a good base of knowledge regarding likely outcomes in the Premier League and perhaps the UEFA Champions League but scaling this to 48 countries appeared a bit of a stretch!
However, regardless of the AI and HI outcomes, it has revolutionised my watching and interest in the competition...instead of a focus every few days with the England National Team, there is a continual interest in each result and how is my score getting on in comparison to Qlik Predict, Colleagues and most importantly my nieces who made choices on purely aesthetic grounds!
I've been a Qlik 'person' for 15 years, starting with Qlik View used in Player Recruitment and then as a Player Development register, before the transition to Qlik Sense and a multitude of business and performance applications within my role as Head of Data Solutions at The Premier League. The structure of the Associative engine, the permission options with Section Access as well as the governed architecture together with, what i describe as the control of high level programming language with the flexibility of working with SQL operations to build data models.. In my view, unmatched in the world and the most powerful data management platform - but then again, you already knew that!
As someone who was taught to code in Pascal and then base C, I'm old school in engineering my scripts, a series of logical Extract & Transform subroutines called from a main() control routine. I've baulked against the wizards, they are amazingly clever but i like to be in control of my code and knowing exactly what is associated with what!
So, what did i think about Qlik Predict and the use of AI in predicting the results of football matches. The advent of AI is everywhere, often mis-termed in my view, but a phenomenon that isn't going away! Quadie and the Qlik team have done an amazing job in showcasing the power of the Qlik suite of functions that underpin both the 'brains' of the application and the UI.
As a person understanding the complexities of the beautiful game, i hope that these are too much for Qlik Predict! The uncertainty of VAR and refereeing decisions together with the under dogs having a stellar day have already thrown up many of the < 10% outlier results. The Group Stages gave a 3 game buffer for the statistics to even themselves out but as we are now in the 'business end' of the Knockout Phase, the effects beyond the models come into crucial play. For example England playing Mexico at altitude in the Azteca Stadium, Mexico with a largely partisan Mexican crowd is probably not reflected in a model derived from the past performance, players and teams!
My view has always been that AI is a fantastic creative tool as well as providing an ability to analyse vast amounts of data to provide insights and ideas but, and crucially but, needs a human to sense check the results. I use Qlik Predict AI in my day job to great effect but i really hope that it doesn't beat me in this competition. My nieces, well that another story!
Have fun, keep Qlik'ing and enjoy the World Cup shocks and surprises!
Hi Steve! This is so true: "unmatched in the world and the most powerful data management platform"! As a Brazilian, it was tough to see Argentina in the prediction as champion! Hoping for it to be wrong! LOL
Live and Breathe Qlik & AWS. Follow me on my LinkedIn | Know IPC Global at ipc-global.com
Steve Palmer here, former Premier League player, current Qlik devotee and contributor to the Choose your Champion podcast!
Oh hey. I thought your name was familiar, and it turns out it was. Since the local (Israeli) media would cover Watford a ton when Ronny Rosenthal played there, I presumably heard it there.
