Keynote
Speakers
Keynote Session on AI Speaker
Vice President of Hockey Strategy and Research, Buffalo Sabres
Sam Ventura is the Vice President of Hockey Strategy and Research for the Buffalo Sabres, and an affiliated faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Statistics & Data Science. He also serves as an advisory board member for the University of Pittsburgh’s MS in Quantitative Economics program. Prior to that, he was the Director of Hockey Operations and Director of Hockey Research for the Pittsburgh Penguins; a professor of Statistics at CMU, where he also received his PhD (Statistics, 2015); an assistant coach for Carnegie Mellon’s ice hockey team; and faculty advisor to the CMU Sports Analytics Club. Sam has co-authored multiple R packages for open-source data collection and analysis, including nhlscrapr, nflscrapR, and spew, and he co-founded war-on-ice.com. He co-organizes the annual Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference. His current research interests include evaluating in-game athlete decision-making, optimizing human athletic performance, and objective decision-making for professional sports front offices.
Lauren is an engineer on ESPN’s industry-leading Sports Analytics team. She and the team create analytical storytelling tools, like the Football and Basketball Power Index ratings used across collegiate and professional sports, and develop products and experiences to support insightful and innovative storytelling. Before moving to Connecticut to work at ESPN in 2013, the Oklahoma native and University of Oklahoma mathematics graduate started her career by blending her love of sports and numbers as a high school math teacher and coach. While at OU, she represented on the sidelines with the pom squad allowing her to experience memorable sports moments from the sidelines. Lauren and her husband, John, live in Connecticut with their dog, Watson.
2025 Football Analytics Workshop: Transforming the
Big Data Bowl
Udit Ranasaria
Director of Deep Learning, SūmerSports
BIO:
Udit Ranasaria is the Director of Deep Learning at SūmerSports, where he develops creative deep-learning solutions for American football analytics, particularly in areas overlooked by teams. Recently he published a paper and open source repository applying Transformers to NFL tracking data that helped multiple winning projects in the 2025 Big Data Bowl. Before joining Sūmer, Ranasaria began his sports analytics journey as an Honorable Mention recipient in the 2020 Big Data Bowl before working in Football Research at the Cleveland Browns. He holds a Computer Science degree from Carnegie Mellon University. When he isn't thinking about modeling for football, he is taking recreational pickleball too seriously.
Vishakh Sandwar
Research Engineer, SūmerSports
BIO:
Vishakh Sandwar is currently a Research Engineer at SūmerSports on the Football AI team, and half of the 2025 NFL Big Data Bowl winning team for his work on using transformers to predict man vs. zone coverage. He's simultaneously finishing his final year at NYU Stern where he's studying Math and Finance. His interests are bayesian statistics, startups and the Green Bay Packers, and his experience is in the application of statistical concepts in a breadth of fields, not limited to finance, biology, and football.
Location
Conference Location
The CMSAConference will be held in Baker Hall at Carnegie Mellon University, providing a dynamic setting for collaboration and learning. Join us in this vibrant environment to immerse yourself in the world of sports analytics.
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA
Hotels & Lodging
The CMSAC 2026 hotel block is at the Hilton Garden Inn Pittsburgh University Place. Click the link below to reserve your room.
If you are in need of additional lodging, please refer to the following hotels in the area:
Springhill Suites in Bakery Square
Sheraton Pittsburgh Airport Hotel
Courtyard by Marriott Pittsburgh Airport
DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Pittsburgh Airport
Hampton Inn & Suites Pittsburgh/Waterfront-West Homestead
*Please note that there is no designated hotel block at any of these locations and pricing cannot be guaranteed
