AI to Football Predictions: our latest Senior Project Showcase

Richmond Business School’s senior projects have just been showcased in this semester’s Senior Project Poster Exhibition, with fascinating topics from AI response on social media to predicting team performance in European football. The showcase was well attended by faculty, staff and students. 

Our Award Winners:

Best participation award: Sophia DeBlaze for her project “How has remote work and platform-based labor affected experiences of social isolation among workers in the post-COVID business environment?”

Engagement award: Anna Hubbard for her project “The effect of wind forecast errors on UK imbalance prices”

Insightfulness award: Ozoda Asanova for her project “How do consumers discuss and interpret inflation in response to media coverage?”

Here are the full student participants and their projects:

• Eloise Delvalle, a senior majoring in Fashion Marketing and Management, is conducting qualitative research on how consumers respond to AI-generated content on social media, focusing specifically on Instagram. A thematic analysis is conducted of 650 user comments across 5 renowned luxury fashion brands to understand consumer responses and attitudes towards AI-enabled marketing.  

• Anna Hubbard, an Economics Major, examines whether errors in day-ahead wind forecasts help explain movements in UK imbalance prices, using half-hourly data from 2019 to 2025 and testing whether those effects are persistent, asymmetric, and stronger during extreme price periods. It does this by combining time-series econometric methods. 

• Gaia Salvio, a senior majoring in Finance and Investment with a minor in Accounting, is conducting quantitative research on the impact of the Brexit referendum on stock market performance and volatility. Focusing on a comparative analysis between the UK and Italy, her study uses daily stock index data from the FTSE 100 and FTSE MIB to examine changes before and after the referendum. Using regression analysis and volatility measures such as absolute daily returns, the project explores how financial markets respond to political uncertainty and whether such shocks have short-term or lasting effects. 

• Jay Patel, a senior majoring in Digital Marketing, is conducting a comparative case study to explore how virtual and human influencers communicate and the reactions they elicit. Building case studies based on the visual strategies and brand narratives of 10 Instagram influencers, as well as viewer responses, Jay investigates how factors such as the uncanny valley effect, parasocial relationships, and perceived authenticity shape consumer engagement with AI-generated and real-life influencers. 

• Abeed Nurudeen, a Business Analytics major, examines whether relative transfer expenditure serves as a statistically significant predictor of team performance within European football, and whether the timing of evaluation – early, mid, or late in the season – significantly influences this relationship. The research challenges the traditional approach of assessing transfer success exclusively at the end of the season. 

• Oulimata Diallo, a senior majoring in Business Management: Entrepreneurship with a minor in sociology, is using an inductive approach to explore the contrast between human-based and artificial intelligence-powered businesses in the event planning industry. Analyzing 600 reviews collected over six years from eight global companies powered by both humans and artificial intelligence, Oulimata examines the operational success of businesses led by artificial intelligence compared to those operated by humans from clients’ perspectives. 

• David Tousignant, a senior majoring in Business Management, International Business, is conducting quantitative research on how students perceive their own employability in an AI-disrupted labor market. Using an online survey of 62 students at Richmond American University London and regression analysis, the project examines how AI skills confidence, AI usage frequency and gender shape students’ self-perceived employability in an increasingly AI‑driven world of work. 

Congratulations to all participants on their impressive presentations! 

The event was organised by the senior project supervisors Drs Theano Lianidou and Vasileios Bougioukos.