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Draft:DeCervo

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deCervo LLC
Company typePrivate
Industry
FoundedFebruary 28, 2014; 10 years ago (2014-02-28) in New York, New York, U.S.
FoundersJason Sherwin, Ph.D. and Jordan Muraskin, Ph.D.[1]
Headquarters
Beach Lake, Pennsylvania
,
United States
Key people
  • Jason Sherwin, Ph.D. (CEO)[2]
  • Jordan Muraskin, Ph.D. (CTO)[3]
Products
  • uHIT Baseball[4]
  • uHIT Softball[5]
  • uCALL for Umpires[5]
  • uCALL for Officials[6]
  • e-TRAIN[7]
OwnersJason Sherwin, Ph.D. and Jordan Muraskin, Ph.D.
WebsitedeCervo.com

deCervo LLC commonly referred to as deCervo, is an American neurotechnology company specialized in making software applications for decision-making optimization. The company is a defense contractor and primarily makes products for sports use, while later products have been for police and law enforcement use. The company was founded in 2014 by Jason Sherwin, Ph.D. and Jordan Muraskin, Ph.D. with the goal of improving human performance, especially in high-speed decision-making.[8]

History

[edit]

2012–2013: Research Pre-Founding

[edit]

In 2012, Sherwin and Muraskin published their first study on the brain signals associated with deciding on different baseball pitches.[9] In a follow up study, they looked at how these signals compared between real baseball hitters and age-/gender-matched controls.[10] In 2013, Sherwin published a study done with the United States Army characterizing the brain signals associated with decisions in a defensive combat environment.[11] In a later follow up study, he would explore how those signals compared between Army veterans / others with small arms experience and naïve civilians.[12]

Sherwin and Muraskin published an abstract and presented at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2013.[13][14] That same year they attended the Sabermetrics, Scouting and the Science of Baseball conference, later speaking at that event in 2015.[15] From these exposures to professional baseball, they decided that an industrial application of their research was possible.

2014–2016: Founding

[edit]

In 2014, Sherwin and Muraskin founded deCervo under its first name “Neuroscout,” having won $10,000 in seed money and a spot in the new Startup Lab of Columbia University.[16] Scientific and popular press noted the company’s similarity in name and focus to another company called “Neuroscouting.”[17][18]

To avoid confusion, the company changed its name to “deCervo” in 2015. The origin of the company name is reportedly linked to a girlfriend of Sherwin at the time. Being French, she suggested du cerveau, or “from the brain”, as a company name. Sherwin and Muraskin anglicized the phrase to alliterate with “decisions,” resulting in the name “decervo”, or its more common capitalization as “deCervo”.[14] Keeping its original focus, deCervo’s focus remained to explore the neuroscience involved in sports[2] and to specialize in high-speed decision-making[8].

In 2015, deCervo began to service its first clients in College and Major League Baseball.[2][19][20] That same year, while finishing studies at Columbia University, Sherwin and Muraskin published two more studies on the brain signals related to baseball hitting. They showed that there were distinct brain signal detectable with functional magnetic resonance imaging (or fMRI) before a pitch that indicated the hitter’s performance on the upcoming pitch.[21] They also showed the distinct spatio-temporal patterns of brain activity across electroencephalography (EEG) between Division I hitters and age-/gender-matched controls.[10] Sherwin found a similar result among United States Army veterans and others with small arms experience vs. age-/gender-matched controls.[12] He found similar results among professional musical instrumentalists too.[22][23]

In 2016, deCervo’s work in College and Major League Baseball expanded.[24][25][26] Sherwin and Muraskin published two more scientific papers. The first showed a more detailed spatio-temporal pattern of brain activity across simultaneous EEG and fMRI among baseball hitters.[27] The second showed indicative structural and functional differences via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of baseball hitters vs. controls.[28] These studies provided further direction to the early days of the company.

2017–2020: Growth in Baseball, Hockey and Defense Contracting

[edit]

During 2017-2020, deCervo continued to scale its role in hitter development for Major League Baseball. By 2018, six Major League Baseball teams were working with deCervo to train their hitters via their baseball product, uHIT.[29] Their work pinpointing exact moments when these hitters decide to swing at an incoming pitch became the focus of widely distributed popular science articles, books ad documentaries.[30][14][31][32][33][34][35] By 2019, Major League Baseball clubs favored using uHIT mostly for Minor League Baseball hitters needing to develop their pitch recognition skills.[4]

Starting in 2018, deCervo began its development of a tool to train the referees and linesmen of the National Hockey League.[36][37] This idea originated from an interview and followup discussions with the late NBA Commissioner, David Stern.[38]

Also, in these years, deCervo began its multi-year relationship with the United States Army. In 2017, it began its basic science research work for the Army to contribute to fundamental understanding of the neurobiology of expertise.[39]

Like many businesses, deCervo’s operations were scaled back in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but they remained active in softball and professional baseball, particularly with its Korean Baseball Organization client, the Hanwha Eagles.[40][5]

2021–2024: Launch in Policing, Expansion in Hockey

[edit]

As early as 2018, deCervo began to speculate publicly about the application of its decision-training techniques to law enforcement and policing.[30][14] By 2021, deCervo had partnered with the New York City Police Department for insight and developed a new product to help law enforcement officers improve their decision-making.[7][41] This new product, “e-TRAIN,” incorporated real bodycam footage and measures reactions police officers have in those moments.[42]

After its third season training National Hockey League officials, deCervo started supplying uCALL for Officials to the officials of the East Coast Hockey League (ECHL) and American Hockey League.[43]

Management and Investors

[edit]

deCervo is managed by its founders, Jordan Muraskin, Ph.D. (Chief Technology Officer) and Jason Sherwin, Ph.D. (Chief Executive Officer)[1]. deCervo is privately held by a small group of investors and its founders.

References

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  1. ^ a b Zach Schonbrun (15 July 2015). "Take me out to the brain game". Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  2. ^ a b c Hari Sreenivasan (18 December 2015). "The neuroscience behind decision making in baseball". SciTech Now. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  3. ^ "Interview with Jordan Muraskin, deCervo, Brain Recording & Sports". The Perception Action Podcast. Episode 25d. April 21, 2016. Retrieved 27 September 2014.
  4. ^ a b Joe LeMire (23 July 2019). "Tech Makes Baseball a Simple Game: You See the Ball, You Hit the Ball, You Got It?". Sports Business Journal. Retrieved 1 March 2024.
  5. ^ a b c "With Jason Sherwin & Jordan Muraskin". Bats Left Throws Right. Episode 40. October 14, 2021. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
  6. ^ Burnside, Scott. "How Do You Become An NHL Official?". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 March 2024.
  7. ^ a b Amit Katwala. "Braining Training Games Are Here To End Police Brutality". Wired UK. Wired Magazine UK. Retrieved 1 March 2024.
  8. ^ a b Scott Simon. "How A Baseball Batter's Brain Reacts To A Fast Pitch". National Public Radio. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
  9. ^ Sherwin, J.; Muraskin, J.; Sajda, P. (2012). "You can't think and hit at the same time: Neural correlates of baseball pitch identification". Frontiers in Neuroscience. 6: 177. doi:10.3389/fnins.2012.00177. PMC 3525877. PMID 23267311.
  10. ^ a b Muraskin, J.; Sherwin, J.; Sajda, P. (2015). "Knowing when not to swing: EEG evidence that enhanced perception-action coupling underlies baseball batter expertise". NeuroImage. 123: 1–10. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.08.028. PMC 4626325. PMID 26299795.
  11. ^ Sherwin, Jason; Gaston, Jeremy (2013). "Soldiers and marksmen under fire: monitoring performance with neural correlates of small arms fire localization". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 7. Frontiers in Neuroscience: 67. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00067. PMC 3600534. PMID 23508091.
  12. ^ a b Sherwin, Jason Samuel; Gaston, Jeremy Rodney (2015). "Experience Does Not Equal Expertise in Recognizing Infrequent Incoming Gunfire: Neural Markers for Experience and Task Expertise at Peak Behavioral Performance". PLOS ONE. 10 (2). Public Library of Science (PLOS): e0115629. Bibcode:2015PLoSO..1015629S. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0115629. PMC 4319735. PMID 25658335.
  13. ^ "A system for measuring the neural correlates of baseball pitch recognition and its potential use in scouting and player development". MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  14. ^ a b c d Schonbrun, Zach (April 17, 2018). The Performance Cortex. Dutton Books. ISBN 978-1101986332.
  15. ^ "Speakers, Sabermetrics, Scouting and the Science of Baseball, Summer 2015". 4 August 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  16. ^ Rebecca Shapiro. "Start Me Up: At the Columbia Startup Lab, the ideas keep on clicking" (PDF). columbia.edu. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
  17. ^ Larry Greenemeier. ""Neuro Scout" Gets into Batters' Heads to Rate Hitters". Scientific American. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  18. ^ Brian Costa. "Baseball's science experiment". WSJ. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  19. ^ Alex Speier. "Red Sox neuroscouting prospects' potential". bostonglobe.com. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
  20. ^ Stephanie Apstein. "Seeing the benefit: MLB teams focus on enhancing players' visual training". si.com. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
  21. ^ Sherwin, J. S.; Muraskin, J.; Sajda, P. (2015). "Pre-stimulus functional networks modulate task performance in time-pressured evidence gathering and decision-making". NeuroImage. 111: 513–525. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.01.023. PMC 4387017. PMID 25614974.
  22. ^ Sherwin, J.; Sajda, P. (2013). "Musical experts recruit action-related neural structures in harmonic anomaly detection: Evidence for embodied cognition in expertise". Brain and Cognition. 83 (2): 190–202. doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2013.07.002. PMC 3877747. PMID 24056235.
  23. ^ Sherwin, Jason Samuel; Sajda, Paul (2018). "Parameterized expertise: Evidence for gradations of musical expertise from electroencephalographic monitoring of auditory decision-making". bioArxiv. doi:10.1101/370379. S2CID 92525426. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  24. ^ "How The Brain Hits, And Where We See It On-Fiel". Society for American Baseball Research. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  25. ^ David Kohn. "Scientists examine what happens in the brain when bat tries to meet ball". Washington Post. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
  26. ^ David Schoenfield (15 March 2016). "Sabermetrics' impact grows as baseball delves deeper into the numbers". ESPN. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  27. ^ Muraskin, J.; Sherwin, J.; Lieberman, G.; Garcia, J. O.; Verstynen, T.; Vettel, J. M.; Sajda, P. (2017). "Fusing multiple neuroimaging modalities to assess group differences in perception-action coupling". Proceedings of the IEEE. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. 105 (1). Proceedings of the IEEE: 83–100. doi:10.1109/JPROC.2016.2574702. PMC 5509353. PMID 28713174.
  28. ^ Muraskin, J.; Dodhia, S.; Lieberman, G.; Garcia, J. O.; Verstynen, T.; Vettel, J. M.; Sherwin, J.; Sajda, P. (2016). "Brain dynamics of post-task resting state are influenced by expertise: Insights from baseball players". Human Brain Mapping. 37 (12): 4454–4471. doi:10.1002/hbm.23321. PMC 5113676. PMID 27448098.
  29. ^ Zach Schonbrun. "When sports teams track their players' brain waves, who really wins?". Fast Co. Create. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  30. ^ a b Zach Schonbrun (13 April 2018). "How do athletes' brains control their movements?". New York Times. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
  31. ^ Katwala, Amit (August 11, 2016). The Athletic Brain. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1471155901.
  32. ^ Lindbergh, Ben (June 4, 2019). The MVP Machine: How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. Basic Books. ISBN 978-1541698949.
  33. ^ "Hitting A Baseball". Daily Planet. Discovery Channel. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
  34. ^ "Predicting A Pro". Bright Now. Curiosity Stream. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
  35. ^ Zach Schonbrun (15 October 2015). "How do athletes' brains control their movements?". New York Times. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
  36. ^ David Feschuk (19 August 2018). "Brain game next frontier in sports". Toronto Star. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  37. ^ Burnside, Scott. "How Do You Become An NHL Official?". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 March 2024.
  38. ^ "Sports, the Digital Bellwether. David Stern In Conversation with Digital Innovators of MLBAM, NBA, NFL, NHL, and more". Columbia Entrepreneurship Innovation and Design. 9 September 2015. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  39. ^ Matt Santaspirts. "Making Quick Decisions, Quicker with Jason Sherwin". The Convergence - An Army Mad Scientist Podcast. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  40. ^ "Hitting A Baseball". 2020 World Series. October 23, 2020. Fox Sports Network. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
  41. ^ Paul Hond. "Brain Games: How the Mind Performs Under Pressure". Columbia University Magazine. Columbia University. Retrieved 1 March 2024.
  42. ^ "Beyond The Beltway, April 18, 2021". Beyond The Beltway. April 18, 2021. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
  43. ^ "Interview with Jason Sherwin of uCALL for Officials". 2023 ECHL All-Star Game. January 17, 2023. NHL Network. Retrieved 28 February 2024.
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