Professor and Chair, Statistics and Actuarial Science
Tim Swartz's research interest is statistical computing. Most of his work attempts to take advantage of the power of modern computing to solve real statistical problems. The area where he has devoted a lot of attention is the integration problem arising in Bayesian applications. Lately, his interest in statistics in sport has grown to consume a fair bit of his time..
Associate Professor, Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology
Dave Clarke directs the Laboratory for Quantitative Exercise Biology, the mission of which is to develop predictive models of exercise training adaptations to improve fundamental understanding and optimize training programs. His research and expertise find application primarily with organizations in Canadian high-performance sport.
A lifelong athlete in sports such as swimming and triathlon, his entry to sports analytics was preceded by his undergraduate and Masters degrees in kinesiology, followed by Ph.D. and postdoctoral research in chemical and biological engineering, which he undertook to learn how to mathematically model biological systems. He enjoys the interdisciplinary aspect of sports analytics because it provides endless learning opportunities across disciplines such as statistics, computer science, and business.
Peter Chow-White is director of the Genomics and Networks Analysis Lab and Associate Director of the Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology. He is also an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia and a member of the Centre for Clinical Diagnostic Genomics at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre in Vancouver.
He received his PhD. from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He has been examining developments in new information technologies such as data mining and social media.
He has worked with organizations such as the British Columbia Cancer Agency, The Terry Fox Foundation, Teck Mining, Stantec, the West Vancouver Fire Fighters Charitable Society, and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Oliver Schulte's research focus is machine learning for structured data. Within sports analytics, he has worked on applying advanced techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence to model hockey dynamics. One application is ranking players with regard to their impact on wins, goals, and penalties. While he has won some nice awards, his biggest claim to fame may be a draw against chess world champion Gary Kasparov.
Associate Professor, Management Information Systems
Peter Tingling joined the Beedie School of Business at SFU from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario where his thesis focused on organizational decision-making. He has had a long association with higher education and has taught at several business schools.
Prior to academia, he had more than two decades of industrial experience working in a number of senior line and staff positions as well as consulting to a diverse range of Fortune 500, government, and start-up organizations across North America. Winner of a 2004 Literati Club research award and a 2007 TD Canada Trust Distinguished Teaching Award, he currently teaches the under-graduate Introduction to Business in a Networked Economy (BUS 201) course, Managerial Accounting (BUS640) in the Executive MBA, and Special Topics in MIS (BUS 722) in the part-time MBA programme.
He serves as a Senator of the University and is the MIS Area Coordinator. He is a member of the Senate Commitee on University Honours (SCUH), the Electoral Standing Commitee (ESC), the Planning and Priorities Committee, and the Undergraduate Competitions Committee. Outside of the University, Dr. Tingling is the president and CEO of Octothorpe Software Corporation, a decision sciences company. Peter Tingling’s research examines the intersection of rational process and ceremony in quantitative and qualitative decision making. His specific focus is decision quality in areas such as ordinal ranking in sports drafts and non-voluntary job loss in high skill knowledge intensive industries.
A lifelong sports fan and numbers nerd, I started buying Bill James Baseball Abstracts in the early 1980's and have been hooked on research at the sports+statistics interface ever since. I have happily embraced opportunities to practice the craft, starting with my 1987 Master's Thesis in Statistics at UNC, "Estimating the Run-Scoring Potential of a Successful Stolen Base." I got my PhD in Statistics from Iowa State and worked at Kansas State for 13 years during the rise of Bill Snyder, before coming to SFU in 2006.
I have published extensively in collaborations in a wide range of disciplines, including sports analytics, and have worked on developing statistical methodology with students and colleagues within the discipline. I have authored a book on Analysis of Categorical Data with R jointly with a former Master's and PhD student, who also collected the NFL Placekick data that is featured heavily in the book.
My current statistical research interests are in statistical learning methods, especially tree-based ensembles and model-selection problems. In sports, I am a member of the world's longest-running continuous fantasy baseball league, the Snedecor Baseball League, and I am an avid curler. I am working on projects in curling and would love to find more projects involving that sport. I am also interested in modeling the progression through levels in minor-league baseball.
