On 21 April (World Creativity and Innovation Day) we promised you a sneak peek into the heart and soul of our Innovation Lab, to find out what ‘A Day in the Life’ is like as part of the team there...
Now, you can read what they believe to be the definition of success, what they’re looking forward to in the future, and individual insights about this career path...
I chose this career path because...
[Pietro Termine - R&D Engineer]
…I’ve always been extremely passionate about science, technology, innovation, and their application fields. I see technology as an instrument to improve everyday life, and this career allows me to be in contact with novel and cutting-edge technology, as well as being able to explore and learn new things, in multidisciplinary environments.
I would describe my job as…
[Gianni Gallina - R&D Technical Lead]
…a tremendous journey to discover, explore, suggest, drive and shape what's next. It's a challenging experience, nurturing and growing what the team can achieve on daily basis: sometimes we know what we are doing, and where we are going, sometimes things feel new to us, but that’s what drives us - we have no fear of the unknown or learning a new skill. We are in ‘always-learning’ mode, and we always challenge ourselves to deliver our best results, which gives us a continuous opportunity to grow together.
My friends and family describe my job as...
[Federico Barbiero - Data Scientist]
Sometimes it can be hard for people without a technical background to understand exactly what we do. My family and friends know I work with cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, but the thing that fascinates them most about my job is the opportunity to work within the sports and entertainment industries.
My favorite thing about being part of the Innovation Lab is…
[Dani Berrone – Data Analyst]
I’m happy and proud to be part of the Innovation Lab, because it’s the place where we share ideas and develop solutions that can improve both our working experience and our business. The Innovation Lab is not just producing and delivering to our clients, it’s also where we share our experiences to grow as individual team members and as a global company.
Pietro Marini – Group Head of Innovation, Clemente Giorio – Senior R&D and ML Engineer, Mattia Polello – Senior Data Engineer and Morgana Lalli – Data Scientist, tell us more...
We start the day by...
As some of us are in the office and others are working from home, whoever is in the office usually kicks off the day with a good espresso – as per our Italian heritage – and great colleagues. We then jump in a team call to clarify everyone's focuses for the day.
An ordinary day at the Innovation Lab goes like this...
After an espresso and our team call, we start carrying out the day’s tasks. As we work on multiple projects simultaneously, every day is unique in the way it rolls out: we may be carrying out individual research activities, liaising with various groups to brainstorm potential solutions to challenges we may face, or manually annotating and preparing data to train ML models, etc.
We also attend/host a significant number of events throughout the year; therefore, we dedicate some days to preparing content or attending such events.
We know it’s been a good day when...
We solve the challenges we have encountered the previous day, and we don’t find any additional ones – so that we can progress on development activities.
If we could describe our team in three words, we would say…
Creative, committed, and agile
The best thing about our team is…
That we have no possibility of ever getting bored: the concurrence of projects, the exploratory nature of our activity, and the diversity of the external stakeholders we engage with means that we always work on something new, or work on familiar things in a new way.
After work, you'll find us…
Most likely right next to where our office is, having a beer or a glass of wine – especially in spring/summer.
A song that gets us in the zone is…
Pretty much everything from indie rock to Italian songwriters. We have pretty different tastes in the team, and this makes up for a lot of variability in what we listen to.
We are passionate about…
Technology, data and sports. Food is also a relevant aspect of our team – we are always looking for nice places to eat together, both with the team as well as with external partners/clients.
To us, the definition of success is…
Seeing our colleagues from the Deltatre business units take charge and focus on the implementation of the proof of concepts we build and, generally, of the outputs of our activity. Another sign that we are doing a good job is the amount of support requests we receive from everywhere within the wider group: “Has this ever been done before?” “Is this technically feasible?” “How could we approach this in a better way?”…are all questions we love to hear our colleagues ask us.
We're excited about the future of...
Literally everything around which our activity revolves. The future of our industry, of technology – both from a software and hardware perspective, the future of sports and entertainment and of how fans will increasingly become the core focus of brands and properties. Our goal is to build the means for all these individuals to engage with and create additional value in a continuous and sustainable way and, as we do that, to shape the way these interactions occur.