SAS wins 2023 social impact award for The Batting Lab

Analytics powerhouse receives top honor in the education category

The Batting Lab from SAS has won the Education Campaign category of the 2023 PRNEWS Social Impact Awards, which honor outstanding corporate social responsibility and diversity equity and inclusion initiatives. The award recognizes communicators who use their platforms to better their communities and the global community at large, focusing specifically on companies influencing education.

SAS is passionate about improving STEM education and making math accessible to all children, empowering them to see data in their everyday lives. SAS created The Batting Lab with two goals: to help kids improve their baseball skills and gain confidence with data to boost their data literacy.

The Batting Lab is an interactive batting cage that makes math fun by combining baseball with analytics to help kids improve their swing through data. With each swing of the bat, audio sensors detect contact and activated sensors capture the swing. The footage is processed using computer vision and hundreds of sensors in the batter’s box record how a player shifts their weight throughout the swing. Once hit, the ball’s flight is recorded in real time. To provide feedback, SAS^® Event Stream Processing uses a hidden Markov model created in SAS Econometrics to ingest video and sensor data.

To collect data for The Batting Lab, SAS partnered with elite college baseball and softball players from North Carolina State University and filmed footage of players’ swings to be analyzed by computer vision. Each swing is scored and combined with business rules created by professional coaches to create recommendations for the player.

“The winners for this year’s Social Impact Awards are exemplary models of corporate social responsibility and diversity, equity and inclusion,” said Erika Bradbury, Editorial Director of PRNEWS. “Our honorees deserve to be recognized for their work in their respective communities, and it’s a privilege to recognize them for their commitments.”

SAS, in partnership with McCann New York and their production partner Volvox labs, developed the program. Special credit to SAS employees from all over the company including Marketing, R&D, Education and Social Innovation as well as the North Carolina State University baseball and softball staff, and the Performance Academy in Apex, NC, who hosted the physical smart cage during the program. 

Learn more about The Batting Lab and about how SAS is making an impact in education.

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