With AI, the Ball’s Always in Marco’s Court
What if you wanted to play tennis but needed a coach? That was the conundrum facing Marco ’26 as a middle-school student in lockdown during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a question that stuck with him well into high school and one he sought to answer through his Cullman Scholarship experience.
With the guidance of the Cambridge Centre for International Research, Marco spent the better part of his summer familiarizing himself with the history, common applications, and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI). As a culminating project, he channeled his middle-school self and rejuvenated an idea he first developed while learning remotely at his family’s home in Shanghai — an AI tennis coach.
“I couldn’t go anywhere because we were in lockdown, and so I’d usually go down to the garage and hit tennis balls against the wall,” Marco explained. In lieu of a coach, he’d film himself and compare his form to that of tennis great Novak Djokovic. “At about the same time, I came across the concept of AI visualization and I said, ‘Oh, that’s really cool. Maybe I can make a virtual coach.’ But that was in the seventh grade and as you could probably guess, it didn’t exactly work out.”
Marco, now a varsity tennis player with a coach, revisited his seventh-grade challenge when he teamed up with Dr. Robail Yasrab, a senior researcher at the MRC Biostatistics Unit at Cambridge University.
Considered among KUA’s highest honors, the Cullman Scholarship Program was established in 1983 with a gift from Hugh Cullman ’42 and supports students in off-campus study opportunities. In 2025, Marco was afforded the opportunity to work with Yasrab and further explore his passion for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) related subjects, when he was named a Cullman Scholar.
Marco not only took a deep dive into AI visualization but also explored engineering through work at a medical equipment company. Both opportunities helped him pinpoint that research was his real interest.
“This journey really helped me understand both engineering and research from a real-world perspective,” Marco said. “Both paths are exciting for me, but I’d really like to lean more toward research because the reward of learning new things is more suited to what I enjoy.”
Marco successfully created a program that can layer footage of an athlete over those of professionals to compare things like arm angle and hip rotation. In the future, he plans to tweak the program to add features that will estimate useful analytics such as swing speed and torque generation.
Marco said his Cullman experience has also inspired his capstone project for the Giles Family STEM Scholar Program as he attempts to develop a robotic arm that can play ping-pong with a living opponent. He said that aside from the robotics, much of the technology needed to anticipate the path of an incoming ping-pong ball is like the AI visualization used with his virtual tennis coach.
“This experience really gave me the tools I needed to try and accomplish my capstone,” Marco said. “I’d like to thank the Cullman family for an amazing opportunity, and I strongly encourage all sophomore and juniors to apply.”
