CDS Data Science Major Xiang Fu ’26 Earns Prestigious Provost’s Scholars Award for Academic Exploration
Xiang Fu ’26, a data science major in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS), recently received a Provost’s Scholars Award for Academic Exploration. Each year, Boston University (BU) distributes up to 20 of these awards meant to “demonstrate the spirit of a true scholar at a research university” through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP). Recipients receive $1,000 in funding and are recognized during Family & Friends Weekend in October.
Fu earned the award for creating an agent-based deep-learning soccer strategy simulation platform he’s dubbed STRIKE (Simulation for Tactical Reinforcement with Intelligent Kinetic Environments). Fu said he laid the foundation for his research at the intersection of computer vision and sports analytics in Professor Leonidas Kontothanassis' DS 210: Programming for Data Science course, which shows students the power of graph algorithms in modeling complex systems.
“I'm truly honored and grateful to receive the Provost's Award. This recognition means a great deal to me, not just for the crucial funding it provides but also for the validation it offers to a project that has become my passion,” Fu says.
“We congratulate Xiang on this well-deserved honor,” says CDS Associate Provost Azer Bestavros, the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of Computer Science. “He has done an impressive job of incorporating teachings from CDS, such as using Dijkstra's algorithm for weighted graphs, to conceptualize soccer tactics as a dynamic graph problem. We are so proud of his accomplishments and excited to see where he takes this project.”
An Ambitious Project Using Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Fu’s dataset includes more than 10,000 hours of soccer match footage. He has implemented a sophisticated Graph Neural Network (GNN) architecture using Graph Attention Networks (GATs) with multi-head attention mechanisms.
“When I first started diving into this soccer analytics research, it felt like I was combining my love for the beautiful game with the fascinating world of AI that I've been exploring in my studies,” Fu says. “There were moments when I wondered if I was on the right track or if anyone else would see the potential in this work.
“Receiving this award feels like a big pat on the back, saying, ‘Hey, what you're doing is valuable and exciting!’ It's given me a real boost of confidence and motivation to push even harder with my research.”
Building self-assurance in students to help make such real-life connections between data science and their individual passions offers rewards for faculty members teaching these concepts as well.
“DS 210 encourages students to design their own final project with only a few constraints. One is the use of the Rust language and the other is leveraging graph algorithms taught in class,” Kontothanassis said. “But the choice of datasets, the question the student tries to answer and the actual methodology for answering are left to the student's discretion. This allows students to express their creativity and work on things they are passionate about, while still exercising valuable skills they have acquired through the class.”
Fu said he plans to use much of the funding to acquire a high-performance graphics processing unit (the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070) and a high-capacity external hard drive. He also notes the award affords something money can’t buy: an opportunity to integrate more deeply into the broader research community at BU.
“I'm thrilled about the new connections this might foster — the interdisciplinary conversations it could spark, the collaborative projects it might inspire,” he said. “It's not just about advancing my own research but about contributing to and learning from a vibrant academic ecosystem.”
By Toni Fitzgerald, Maureen McCarthy, Contributor