The largest sports and humanitarian event on the planet this year, the Special Olympics World Games Abu Dhabi 2019, celebrates inclusion and the empowerment of disabled people through the power of sport in line with the Special Olympics global movement.
With volumes of data being generated in real time from multiple sources throughout the games, this event will curate valuable data for not only operational planning purposes but potentially also utilisable for medical research into behavioural insights to drive inclusiveness within society.
With this mission of data driven innovation for the service of humankind at large, the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) of the Special Olympics World Games Abu Dhabi 2019 has partnered with SAS, one of the world’s largest advanced analytics company, naming it as the official analytics supplier of the event.
From March 14 to 21, over 7,500 athletes and 3,000 coaches, representing more than 190 nations, will participate in 24 officially sanctioned Olympic-style sports in world-class venues throughout Abu Dhabi.
A signing ceremony for the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the two parties took place at SAS Middle East’s office in Dubai and was signed by Peter Wheeler, CEO, Special Olympics World Games Abu Dhabi 2019, and Alaa Yousef, Managing Director, SAS Middle East.
Through this partnership, the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) of the Special Olympics World Games Abu Dhabi 2019 utilised a cutting-edge data analytics platform from SAS for the purpose of usage pre, post and during the event.
SAS is a proud partner globally for the Data for Good movement, which encourages using data in meaningful ways to solve humanitarian issues around poverty, health, human rights, education etc., and the Special Olympics movement and its data share the same ethos and spirit.
As the Official Analytics Supplier for the Special Olympics 2019, SAS will not only offer its Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and data management platform to analyse traditional and non-traditional data sources like athlete and spectator geospatial data, health data, spectator and volunteer data, but a globally sourced team of volunteer data scientists and data enthusiasts will, through the course of the event, provide support to drive intelligent event insights as well.
Peter Wheeler, CEO, Special Olympics World Games Abu Dhabi 2019, said “The World Games in Abu Dhabi will mark the start of the next 50 years of Special Olympics, and so we want to ensure that these games are innovative and technologically advanced. Leveraging the latest data-gathering methods to monitor our athletes and other constituents enables us not only to deliver excellence at the World Games, but also creates a legacy of valuable data that will help to redefine the future of the Special Olympics movement. We are grateful to SAS for partnering with us in this effort.”
Alaa Yousef, Managing Director, SAS Middle East, said: “Inclusion is about offering the same opportunities to everyone, and providing encouragement and services to accommodate people’s differences. At SAS we are passionate about this cause. While some people look at data and see numbers, we see numbers and see faces and an opportunity to drive change. This partnership with Special Olympics Local Organizing Committee Abu Dhabi also reflects our commitment to support such path breaking initiatives encouraged by the visionary leadership of the UAE Government.”
The Special Olympics World Games 2019 is the first large scale event in the Middle East and Africa region where the power of advanced analytics, AI and Machine Learning will be utilised to help change the future narrative of people of determination (disabled people).
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