Analytics Magazine Analytics Magazine, May/June 2014 | Page 55

Football heatmap: visualizing player performance in any situation. Peyton Manning Heat Map and communicate results, gives Perduco a competitive advantage in the defense space. This same advantage can be applied to other business areas such as energy, healthcare and finance. However, a chance encounter and 30-minute discussion brought a new opportunity – sports – to the forefront. I retired from the United States Air Force in 2011 and partnered with Toyzanne Mason to form The Perduco Group. My final assignment in the Air Force was spent serving on faculty at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) at WPAFB. On a return visit to AFIT in 2012, I stopped in to visit with Dr. Ken Bauer, professor in the Department of Operational Sciences at AFIT. We traded updates, and the topic turned to sports. Ken mentioned an article A NA L Y T I C S he had recently published with Jacob on predicting NBA outcomes using artificial neural networks. I knew Jacob from his time at AFIT and had even helped Jacob find a job with a defense consulting company (not Perduco) after graduation. What he did not know, however, was that Jacob’s article had just topped 1,000 full downloads from the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. For those not familiar with academic literature, this is an uncommonly high number. I left AFIT that day knowing two things: Perduco was going into the sports domain, and Jacob was the right person to lead this push. I first called my business mentor and vice president for Perduco, Chris Mason, and brought up the idea of expanding Perduco into the sports sector. As a M A Y / J U N E 2 014 | 55