R and the Undocumented NHL API

Join us for pizza at 6pm. The three talks will be begin shortly thereafter.

Brett Wiens will present on his hobby analysing NHL statistics using the Undocumented NHL Stats API. The NHL has made extraordinary amounts of information available about teams, players, games, and even individual plays. Cleaned and organized, this is an extremely rich source of raw data that can be used for all sorts of analytics.

Steeped in tradition, the NHL is a lush breeding ground for gut-based decision making, and “because-we’ve-always-done-it-that-way” thinking. Brett has developed a series of scripts, modules, and functions in R that gather, process, clean, and present this information with easy-to-digest visualizations through a Shiny interface. This presentation will touch on the collection of data, how it was cleaned and processed, some learnings made along the way, and ultimately the Shiny application to visualize information.

Brett Wiens is a graduate of the Masters of Geographic Information Systems program at the University of Calgary and an avid Calgary Flames fan. He is a data scientist in Cenovus Energy’s Innovation and Analytics team.

Tolu Sajobi is a professor in Community Health Epidemiology. He would like to discuss a proposed training program in data analytics. Some potential opportunities for collaboration among academic and industry experts will be discussed.

Theresa Smith is an environmental engineer who went back to school after the 2015 downturn. She graduated from a Masters in Business Analytics in 2017 and has been working at TransAlta for over a year as a data scientist. She has recently started a meetup group Women in Big Data (https://www.meetup.com/Women-in-Big-Data-Calgary/). This group is a chapter of the larger Women in Big Data organization started by some bright minds at IBM in Seattle. The group aims to facilitate the advancement of women in STEM and data science through learning and networking opportunities.

This event is supported by the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (https://www.pims.math.ca/) and Cenovus Energy (http://www.cenovus.com/)