Tim Brecht

Professor Emeritus

Davis Center, Room 3508
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
200 University Ave. West
Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada

E-mail: brecht AT uwaterloo DOT ca

Current and Recent Projects

It seems that I'm generally not good at keeping this page up to date, so it's probably best to look at my recent publications to see what types of projects I've been working on.

In addition to working with people on current projects (some of which are described below), I often enjoy working with students or other researchers who have their own ideas for projects.

Advanced Hockey Analytics

The goals of this project are to use puck and player tracking data to derive interesting new metrics and to deliver streams of new, interesting, live, player and game analytics in real-time using 5G networks to:

Fans and game viewers
Statistics tracking, fantasy sports and sports betting web sites
Broadcasters, Analyists, and Reporters
Players, coaches, and executives

This work has been supported by Rogers, the NHL and AWS.

Miles Pitassi, Evan Iaboni, Fauzan Lodhi, and Tim Brecht,
Examining the Impact of Traffic on Shot Attempts in Ice Hockey
The 2nd International Sports Analytics Conference and Exhibition (ISACE)
17 pages. Shanghai, China. September 26-27, 2025 (to appear).
[PDF]
Evan Iaboni, Sebastian Negulescu, Miles Pitassi, Amir Nazemi, Jerrin Bright, Vasyl Chomko,
David A. Clausi, Sven Dickison and Tim Brecht,
Position Paper: New Views of Shots - Towards Measures of Net Visibility and Reachability,
Linköping Hockey Analytics Conference, Research Track (LINHAC),
15 pages. Linköping Sweden. June 2-4, 2025.
[PDF]
Evan Iaboni, Sebastian Negulescu, Miles Pitassi, Fauzan Lodhi, and Tim Brecht,
Individual Puck Possessions Part I: Frequency, Duration, and Distance Travelled,
Linköping Hockey Analytics Conference, Research Track (LINHAC),
15 pages. Linköping Sweden. June 2-4, 2025.
[PDF]
Fauzan Lodhi, Sebastian Negulescu, Miles Pitassi, Evan Iaboni and Tim Brecht,
Individual Puck Possessions Part II: Speed Bursts and Possession Times within Teams,
Linköping Hockey Analytics Conference, Research Track (LINHAC),
12 pages. Linköping Sweden. June 2-4, 2025.
[PDF]
Miles Pitassi,
Puck Possession and Net Traffic Metrics in Ice Hockey
M.Math. Thesis, Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, May 2025.
[PDF]
Miles Pitassi, Tim Brecht and Mingyue Xie
Puck Possessions and Team Success in the NHL
Linköping Hockey Analytics Conference, Research Track (LINHAC),
16 pages. Linköping Sweden. June 3-5, 2024.
[PDF] [Talk Recording]
David Radke, Jaxin Lu, Jackson Woloschuk, Tin Le, Daniel Radke, Charlie Liu, Tim Brecht,
Analyzing Passing and Pressure Metrics in Ice Hockey using Puck and Player Tracking Data
Linköping Hockey Analytics Conference, Research Track (LINHAC),
19 pages. Linköping Sweden. June 7-9, 2023.
[PDF]
David Radke, Tim Brecht, Daniel Radke,
Identifying Completed Pass Types and Improving Passing Lane Models,
Linköping Hockey Analytics Conference, Research Track (LINHAC),
16 pages. Linköping Sweden. June 6-8, 2022.
[PDF]
David Radke, Daniel Radke, Tim Brecht and Alex Pawelczyk,
Passing and Pressure Metrics in Ice Hockey,
Artificial Intelligence for Sports Analytics (AISA) Workshop at IJCAI ’21,
August 21--23, 2021, (Virtual Event) Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 8 pages,
[PDF]

WiTAG: Low-power, WiFi-Compatible, Backscatter Communication

We have done work on new technologies for low-power WiFi-compatible communication for use in IoT devices. For more information see our HotNets, SIGCOMM and MobiComm publications on WiTAG.

Farzan Dehbashi, Ali Abedi, Tim Brecht and Omid Abari,
Verification: Can WiFi Backscatter Replace RFID?
The 27th Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking (MobiCom),
October 25--29, 2021, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA 11 pages,
[Postscript] [PDF]
Ali Abedi, Farzan Dehbashi, Mohammad Hossein Mazaheri, Omid Abari, and Tim Brecht,
WiTAG: Seamless WiFi Backscatter Communication
ACM SIGCOMM, 2020
[Postscript] [PDF] [20 Minute SIGCOMM Video]
Ali Abedi, Mohammad Hossein Mazaheri, Omid Abari and Tim Brecht,
WiTAG: Rethinking Backscatter Communication for WiFi Networks,
17th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets),
7 pages, Redmond, Washington, USA, November, 2018.
[Postscript] [PDF]

Devices and Systems to Support the Internet of Things

In addition to the above work on low-power wireless communication technologies, we've also been exploring the other mechnisims for wireless communication and the use of mmWave signals for fire detection in a system we call RFire, which is described in our paper "Can Future Wireless Networks Detect Fires?".

We have also done work on the design and implementation of a cloud-based architecture that enables the collection, storage and analysis of data from IoT devices in a privacy preserving fashion. This work has significant applications in energy, healthcare, and surveillance sectors.

David Radke, Omid Abari, Tim Brecht and Kate Larson,
Can Future Wireless Networks Detect Fires?
The 7th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Envir onments (BuildSys),
November 16--19, 2020, (Virtual Event) Yokohama, Japan, 4 pages,
(This is commonly referred to as the RFire paper)
[Postscript] [PDF] [Talk Slides] [1 Minute Trailer Video] [5 Minute BuildSys Video]
Ali Abedi, Omid Abari, Tim Brecht,
Wi-LE: Can WiFi Replace Bluetooth?
ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets),
8 pages, Princeton, NJ, USA November 13--15, 2019,
[Postscript] [PDF]
Rayman Preet Singh, Benjamin Cassell, S. Keshav and Tim Brecht,
TussleOS: Managing Privacy Versus Functionality Trade-Offs on IoT Devices,
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review (CCR),
July, 2016.
[Postscript] [PDF]
Rayman Preet Singh, S. Keshav, and Tim Brecht
Cloud-Based Consumer-Centric Architecture for Energy Data Analytics,
Fourth International Conference on Future Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy),
pp. 63-74, Berkeley, California, May, 2013.
[Postscript] [PDF]

Live Streaming and Message-Oriented Middleware (Pub/Sub Systems)

We've built a framework called RocketBufs that is designed to make it easier to implement high-performance message-oriented middleware systems. Our work on RocketBufs was inspired by our previous work on RocketStreams (a system for disseminating live streaming data).

There are several interesting projects that can be done related to the RocketBufs Project.

Huy Hoang, Benjamin Cassell, Tim Brecht, and Samer Al-Kiswany,
RocketBufs: A Framework for Building Efficient, In-Memory, Message-Oriented Middleware,
14th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS),
12 pages, (Virtual Event) Montreal, QC, Canada , July 13–17, 2020.
[Postscript] [PDF] [Talk Video] [Talk Slides]
Benjamin Cassell, Huy Hoang, and Tim Brecht,
RocketStreams: A Framework for the Efficient Dissemination of Live Streaming Vid eo
10th ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys),
7 pages, Hangzhou, China, August 19–20, 2019.
[Postscript] [PDF]

Streaming Video Services

There are a large number and variety of services that stream video over the Internet. Some of these include: Amazon, Apple, CraveTV, HBO, Hulu, Microsoft, Netflix, Shomi, YouTube, and most major sports leagues and television networks. As a result of the popularity of these services, streaming video constitutes more than 50% of Internet traffic. Many of these services distribute data using content distribution networks (CDNs) like Akamai, Conviva or Netflix's own CDN. Our research is focused on understanding, designing, implementing, optimizing and provisioning the growing number of CDN and origin servers distributed throughout the world. The goal is to ensure that services are efficient and cost effective, and that subscribers are provided with the best quality of experience (QoE) possible.

We've been lucky to conduct some of this work with Netflix and to transfer some of our technology into their production servers.

Please see my publications page for related papers and the section above related to live video streaming.

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Last modified: Wed Jul 16 10:55:34 AM EDT 2025