With an infinite amount of data swirling around vast global networks, big data analytics is exploding not only as a means to process and understand abundant information, but as a key method for predicting trends in social and economic behaviour. While data availability continues to gain rapid speed, the challenge lies in ensuring its accuracy. Human error produces ‘dirty data’ which triggers incorrect analytics and leads to inaccurate business decisions. Jaroslaw Szlichta, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Science, is focused on data analytics, business intelligence and big data cleaning. His latest research aims to improve the rate of clean data, which would significantly improve data accuracy, and lead to more precise data analytics predictions and trends. Awarded a post-doctoral fellowship by Mitacs Elevate in 2014, Dr. Szlichta’s research focused on big data integration and continuous data cleaning. He developed an algorithm to automatically integrate and clean all data before any analytics were performed to ensure more accurate outcomes. In 2013, Dr. Szlichta was appointed post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, before joining in July 2014. He brings award-winning, big data analytics expertise to the university and has developed an undergraduate course on the subject. Applying his interest in math to computer science, Dr. Szlichta earned his Master of Science in Engineering from the Faculty of Electronics and Information Science at the Warsaw University of Technology in Warsaw Poland in 2009; and received his Doctorate in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at York University in Toronto, Ontario in 2013. During his doctoral studies, he was appointed a three-year research fellowship at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) in Markham, Ontario; and in 2012, he received the IBM CAS Research Student of the Year Award. A former software developer for Comarch Research & Development in Warsaw, he developed the WYSIWYG reporting system OCEAN GenRap, a novel data analytics reporting solution. Recognized for his collaborative work, Dr. Szlichta received the prestigious CeBIT Business Award. He is also a member of the Big Data Benchmark Community, a global community group aimed at developing a data set that may be used as a benchmark for evaluating research. Ontario Tech University