Stephanie Kovalchik, Victoria University, Australia

Applied statistics workshop 
Stephanie Kovalchik, Game Insight Group of Tennis Australia and Victoria University
"From the Desktop to the Courts: Bringing Statistical Innovation to Professional Tennis"

The growth in sports analytics has created new opportunities for statisticians and data scientists to work full-time in sport. Many of today’s jobs in sports statistics involve a balance between academic and industry goals, in which the statistician aims to translate academic research into valuable products for a myriad of audiences. In this talk, I will describe the research-to-product pipeline experience at the Game Insight Group, a sports statistics innovation initiative of Tennis Australia and Victoria University. The talk will provide specific examples of three common statistical research topics in sport—player ratings, forecasting, and automated event capture—and how we are using both data science and software development tools to build data-driven products in each topic area for use in professional tennis.