No abstract

Sports analytics in general, and football (soccer in USA) analytics in particular, have evolved in recent years in an amazing way, thanks to automated or semi-automated sensing technologies that provide high-fidelity data streams extracted from every game. In this paper we propose a data-driven approach and show that there is a large potential to boost the understanding of football team performance. From observational data of football games we extract a set of pass-based performance indicators and summarize them in the H indicator. We observe a strong correlation among the proposed indicator and the success of a team, and therefore perform a simulation on the four major European championships (78 teams, almost 1500 games). The outcome of each game in the championship was replaced by a synthetic outcome (win, loss or draw) based on the performance indicators computed for each team. We found that the final rankings in the simulated championships are very close to the actual rankings in the real championships, and show that teams with high ranking error show extreme values of a defense/attack efficiency measure, the Pezzali score. Our results are surprising given the simplicity of the proposed indicators, suggesting that a complex systems' view on football data has the potential of revealing hidden patterns and behavior of superior quality

The role of ionic liquids (ILs) as solvents in chemistry is limited by the poor understanding of the solvation phenomenon in these media. The usual classification criteria used for molecular solvents through various experimental measurements fail to insert ILs into a univocal classification for ILs. Here, we first discuss the unsuitability of the usual interpretative scheme for molecular liquids and elucidate schematically the mechanism of solvation in ILs, pointing out the peculiarities that differentiate them with respect to molecular liquids. Second, we focus on reactivity and reaction kinetics in ILs, underlining the many problems that the complexity of these media reflects on the interpretation of kinetic data and some possible approaches to understand qualitatively the (often not trivial) kinetic problems for reactions performed in ILs

In order to rationalize the physicochemical behaviour of ionic liquids (ILs), quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) models have been derived for the conductivity and viscosity of a class of ILs based on the bis(trifluoromethylsulphonyl)imide anion. Data obtained at two different temperatures were analysed to assess the consistency of the derived relationships. Satisfactory correlations were found for both properties, although the QSPR derived for viscosity was heavily temperature dependent. ILs containing nitrile-functionalized cations could not be inserted into satisfactory QSPR. Copyright (c) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Properties of molecules solvated in ionic liquids (ILs) are strongly affected by solvent environment. For this reason, to give reliable results, ab initio calculations on solutes in ILs, including ions constituting ionic liquid itself, have to self-consistently account for the change of both electronic and classical solvation structure in ILs. Here, we study the electronic structure of the methyl-methylimidazolium ion in the bulk liquid of [mmim][Cl] by using the self-consistent field coupling of Kohn-Sham density functional theory and three-dimensional molecular theory of solvation (aka 3D-RISM) with the closure approximation of Kovalenko and Hirata. The KS-DFT/3D-RISM-KH method yields the 3D distribution of the IL solvent species around the [mmim] solute, underlying the most important peculiarities of this kind of systems such as the stacking interaction between neighboring cations, and reproduces the enhancement of the dipole moment resulting from the polarization of the cation by the solvent in a very good agreement with the results of an ab initio MD calculation. The KS-DFT/3D-RISM-KH method offers an accurate and computationally efficient procedure to perform ab initio calculations on species solvated in ionic liquids.