Skip to main content
Connecticut College
  • About Connecticut College
  • Academics
  • Admission & Financial Aid
  • Alumni & Life After Conn
  • Athletics
  • Campus & Community
  • Career Preparation
  • Human Resources
  • Student Experience
  • Calendar
  • News
  • Directory
  • Employment
  • Libraries & Technology
  • CC Magazine
  • Site Map
Make a gift CamelWeb Today at Conn

Specialized Resources

  • Accessibility Services
  • Admission Deadlines
  • Admitted Students
  • Admitted Student Statistics
  • Arboretum
  • Arts and Culture
  • Bookshop
  • Campus Map
  • Clubs and Activities
  • Counseling Services
  • Directions to Campus
  • Essays That Worked
  • Financial Aid Services
  • Health Services
  • International Students
  • Interviewing
  • Libraries
  • Orientation
  • Request Information
  • Residential Life
  • Majors and Minors
  • Student Blog
  • Sustainability
  • Technology Services
  • Title IX: Sexual Respect
  • Transfer Students
  • Tuition and Fees
  • Transportation
  • Visit Campus
  • Academic Advising
  • Academic Calendar
  • Academic Resource Center
  • Arboretum
  • Arts and Culture
  • Camel Card Office
  • Campus Safety
  • Campus Map
  • Career Services
  • Class Schedules
  • Clubs and Student Engagement
  • Connections
  • Counseling Services
  • Course Catalog
  • Equity and Inclusion
  • Environmental Health & Safety
  • Global Focus
  • Health Services
  • Libraries
  • Residential Life
  • Sustainability
  • Technology Services
  • Title IX: Sexual Respect
  • Transportation
  • Academic Advising
  • Academic Calendar
  • Arboretum
  • Arts and Culture
  • Banner Self-Service
  • Camel Card Office
  • Campus Map
  • Campus Safety
  • Center for Teaching & Learning
  • Course Catalog
  • Course Information and Schedules
  • Equity and Inclusion
  • Employee Benefits
  • Environmental Health & Safety
  • Facilities Management
  • Human Resources
  • Instructional Technology
  • Libraries
  • Moodle
  • Sustainability
  • Technology Services
  • Title IX: Sexual Respect
  • Wellness Program
  • Academic Calendar
  • Academic Resource Center
  • Alcohol and Drug Education
  • Arboretum
  • Arts & Culture
  • Athletics Calendar
  • Bookshop
  • Camel Card Office
  • Campus Map
  • Campus Safety
  • Career Services
  • CARE Team
  • Commencement
  • Counseling Services
  • Equity and Inclusion
  • Fall Weekend
  • Applying for Financial Aid
  • First-Year Student FAQ
  • Global Focus
  • Health Services
  • Libraries
  • Orientation
  • Parent enewsletter
  • Parents Council
  • Residential Life
  • Resources for Parents and Families
  • Student Employment
  • Tuition and Fees
  • Visiting New London

 

  • Area Attractions & Events
  • Area Hotels
  • Arboretum
  • Arts and Culture
  • Bookshop
  • Campus Map
  • Campus Safety
  • The Children's Program
  • Community Learning/Volunteering
  • Directions
  • Events and Catering
  • Equity and Inclusion
  • Reserving Harkness Chapel
  • Local Restaurants and Dining
  • OnStage Performances
  • Transportation
  • Alumni Directory
  • Alumni Events
  • Alumni Association
  • Arts and Culture
  • Bookshop
  • Campus Map
  • Fall Weekend
  • Global Focus
  • Libraries
  • Library Databases
  • Notable Alumni
  • Email Help
  • Replacement Diploma
  • Reunion
  • Sponsor an Internship
  • Support the College
  • Title IX: Sexual Respect
  • Transcripts
  • Update Your Info
  • Volunteer
  • Post a job or internship
  • Explore employment programs
  • Learn about funded internships
  • Home 
  • Home 
  • News 
  • News Archive 
  • 2019 
  • The Momentum Equation

The Momentum Equation

Do slam dunks change the course of a basketball game?

What makes a basketball game “explosive?” Commentators know it when they see it. But for Anil Timbil ’20, a student developer at Google Cloud, the answer is in the data.

This season, Google Cloud partnered with the NCAA to provide real-time March Madness analysis, including game predictions that were featured in TV coverage of the tournament. Computer science major Timbil was one of around 30 students charged with creating these insights by crunching a decade’s worth of play-by-play data that the NCAA shared with the internet giant.

“This was the perfect opportunity to combine my interest in basketball and intensive computer science and statistics studies,” said Timbil, a fan of the sport from an early age.

The “explosiveness” question first came up last January, at the Google Cloud & NCAA Hackathon at MIT. There, Timbil and team wondered whether it was possible to quantify the commentators’ intangible claims of a team’s explosiveness. They turned to the data to find out.

First, they focused on “whether dunks had any demonstrable effect on the energy or momentum of a team—something often assumed to be true, but rarely (if ever) exposed with data.”

The short answer: they did.

“Dunks actually contributed to about a 15 percent increase in game acceleration—a much bigger effect than we’d anticipated,” Timbil recalled.

But as good as that insight was, it only indicated so much about a team’s performance. More interesting was what this insight said about explosiveness over the course of a game.

“We wanted to tie explosiveness to some kind of measurable increase in score differential over a specific period of time,” Timbil explained—in other words, how quickly one team outscores another during a run. The students defined a run as one team scoring at least 12 points and the other at most five.

“All together, we considered explosiveness to be the product of weighted speed of scoring and opponents’ stopping power, plus a weighted value for shot accuracy,” Timbil said. “Lots of points in a run is better than a short run with a slightly higher rate of points over time, but we still wanted to be sure to value faster runs as more explosive.”

The last step was using these new data methodologies to rank the explosiveness of this year’s teams. These rankings became game predictions featured in Google commercials screened during the tournament. One even featured Timbil.

The key to success in the data and statistics fields is persistence and diligence, according to one of Timbil’s teachers, Associate Professor of Computer Science Christine Chung.

“The way Google is so publicly highlighting Anil’s team’s work during a television broadcast that reaches millions of homes indicates that it must be world-class,” Chung said. “These novel techniques for analyzing huge amounts of data to pin down a nebulous predictive factor like ‘explosiveness’ can and should be applied to other sports in the future, as well.”  

This April, Timbil was also one of 35,000 attendees at the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco. Timbil and the other student developers received a shout-out from Google CEO Sundar Pichai during his keynote address with Timbil appearing on-screen behind Pichai sporting a Conn hoodie.

“It was really empowering to represent the college among the most competitive universities in the United States,” said Timbil, who is continuing his data science work at a New York City internship this summer.



Four years to your career. Learn more



May 30, 2019

Related News & Media

Recent News

Conn hosts American Mock Trial Association’s annual regional competition

Conn hosts American Mock Trial Association’s annual regional competition

Student News

Conn wins Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess division championship

Conn wins Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess division championship

Student News

Connecticut College
270 Mohegan Avenue
New London, CT 06320
1 (860) 447-1911
admission@conncoll.edu
Web Privacy Policy
Web Accessibility Notice

Website Navigation

  • About Connecticut College
  • Academics
  • Admission & Financial Aid
  • Alumni & Life After Conn
  • Athletics
  • Campus & Community
  • Career Preparation
  • Human Resources
  • Student Experience
Make a gift CamelWeb Today at Conn
  • Calendar
  • News
  • Directory
  • Employment
  • Libraries & Technology
  • CC Magazine
  • Site Map
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn