Meet Tyreal

Welcome! I’m Ty, also known as Dr. Q, an Assistant Professor of Sport Management at Indiana University Bloomington. Outside of work, I enjoy video games (DOTA2, Diablo2, Black Myth: Wukong) and cherish a joyful life with my wife, Tracy. We share our passions, celebrate special moments, and find meaning in the beauty of everyday life.

Open Resource Space

I manage knowledge spaces in the following areas:

• Sport Management Research: Examination of consumer psychology and behavior across sport, esports, and related ecosystems, including but not limited to participation, spectating, and broader consumption practices, as well as the effects of gamification and the dynamics of user-generated content (UGC), alongside the development of accessible pedagogical frameworks that translate research insights into inclusive learning experiences and advance the democratization of knowledge across diverse communities.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP): Application of both traditional and advanced NLP techniques, including lexicon based and rule based methods, word embeddings, aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA), topic modeling, and the integration of large language models (LLMs) for semantic interpretation, classification, and inference.
• Computer Vision (CV): Application of conventional computer vision and machine learning approaches, such as feature based methods and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), alongside large multimodal models (LMMs) for image understanding, cross modal reasoning, and video analytics.
• Datasets: Curation and analysis of multimodal datasets encompassing UGC, news media, corporate reports, and other textual, visual, and audiovisual sources.
• Agent Skills: Development of specialized agentic modules (q-skills) that autonomously execute end-to-end tasks, including analytical pipeline execution, social media content generation, and the production of formatted research reports.

Resources available on: GitHub, Hugging Face, OSF, and YouTube.

Join Our Team

The Applied Artificial Intelligence in Sport Lab at Indiana University Bloomington is growing. Our team includes John Ruichen Yang and Willie Weizhe Li, and I am recruiting PhD students to join us.

PhD students in the lab receive a funded assistantship that includes an annual stipend, a full tuition waiver, and health insurance. Through the assistantship, you will have the opportunity to teach both in-person and online courses, starting as a teaching assistant. For research, you will have data and computing resources from my research grant and the Indiana University high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Each project starts from a research question, and you will learn to choose the data, structured or unstructured, and the methods that best answer it. You will lead projects based on your own research interests and have the opportunity to contribute to mine, and you are expected to publish at least one first-authored article in a top sport management journal or a leading business journal (rated A or above by ABDC), such as Willie Weizhe Li’s article in the Journal of Sport Management. With department and lab support for travel, you will present at both domestic and international conferences.

If you are interested, please email me at tyqian@iu.edu with your CV and your answers to these questions:

1. What led you to reach out to me, and what do you hope to gain from joining the lab?
2. How would my mentorship support your development, and what skills, experiences, or ideas would you bring to the lab?
3. Which of my projects or publications stood out to you, and how would you extend or improve it?
4. How do you define meaningful research? Give one example of a research question you find meaningful, and explain why.
5. What makes sport a distinct context for research, rather than one more marketplace for general management, marketing, or consumer behavior research?

These questions have no definitive answers, and my own views on them continue to evolve. Please be yourself and write in your own words. Using AI to polish your writing is fine, but do not let it replace your reasoning. Heavily polished responses tend to read as mechanical, and what I hope to see is your voice and your ideas.

Visitors Around the World

Here is a glimpse of where visitors are connecting from around the world.