The Department of Systems and Biomedical Engineering (SBME) at Cairo University is proud to announce another outstanding international achievement by its students, with three football analytics research works accepted at the
3rd International Sports Analytics Conference and Exhibition (ISACE 2026), to be held in Vancouver, Canada.

These works reflect a growing research direction within the department: using engineering thinking, data science, and artificial intelligence to ask deeper questions about football. What makes two plays tactically similar? How can we compare players beyond traditional heatmaps? How can off-ball movement and attacking influence be quantified in a more interpretable way?

Under the supervision of Dr. Tamer Basha, Professor at the department, the following works were accepted:

“A Multi-Dimensional Spatial Similarity Framework for Football Player Comparison: Extending Positional Analysis with Tactical Context”
by Shehap Elhadary (BDE 2026), Bassel Ahmed (BDE 2026), and Amrou Abdelmawla (BDE 2026).
This work explores how player similarity can be studied beyond simple positional maps, considering not only where players operate on the pitch, but also the types of actions they perform in different zones.

“Trajectory-Based Retrieval of Similar Soccer Plays Using Time-Warping and Anchor-Based Representations”
by Shehap Elhadary (BDE 2026), Amrou Abdelmawla (BDE 2026), Mahmoud Nasr (BDE 2026), and Dr. Tamer Basha.
This work grew from the question of what actually makes two football plays similar, developing an interpretable way to retrieve tactically similar plays using important moments in the ball trajectory rather than relying on complex black-box models.

“Quantifying Off-Ball Attacking Influence Using Additive Pitch Control Attribution”
by Bassel Hammad, Mahmoud Nasr (BDE 2026), Omar Refaat (BDE 2026), and Dr. Tamer Basha.
This work focuses on one of football’s most important hidden contributions: off-ball attacking influence, aiming to better understand how players shape attacking opportunities even when they are not directly involved with the ball.

Together, these accepted papers show the strength and creativity of SBME students in applying computational methods to real-world analytical challenges. They also highlight the department’s potential to contribute to fast-growing international research areas that connect engineering, AI, sports science, and decision-making.

The department extends its sincere congratulations to all participating students and to Dr. Tamer Basha for this outstanding achievement and for supporting a research environment where ambitious student ideas can grow into international contributions.