Invited talk by Prof. Vishal Misra on What if?- Exploring counterfactuals and predicting cricket scores

Title Of the Talk: What if?- Exploring counterfactuals and predicting cricket scores
Speaker: Prof. Vishal Misra
Date &Time: Tuesday, 13th August 2019 11:00-12:00
Venue: Room No-C-LH9

Abstract:

“What if?” is one of the favorite questions that occupies minds, from sports fans to policy makers to philosophers. Invariably, there is no one answer to the What ifs and everyone remains convinced in their own alternate realities. Recently however, there has been a lot of work in data driven approaches to answer (at least a subset of) these What If questions. The mathematical tool of (Robust) Synthetic Control examines these What If questions by creating a synthetic version of reality, and explore its evolution in time as a counterfactual to the actual reality.

Recently we proposed a generalization of Robust Synthetic Control, the multi-dimensional Robust Synthetic Control (mRSC), and as a fun application of the idea, we show how we can predict cricket scores accurately. We utilize the twin metrics of runs and wickets, and cast it as an mRSC problem that enables us to predict the evolution of an innings with very little data. While we will continue to endlessly speculate What if Kumble had continued as coach rather than Shastri, in this talk we describe a mathematical tool that lets us predict the end of innings score after only a few overs!

A blogpost on this topic is available here

Speaker Profile:

Dr. Vishal Misra is Professor in the Computer Science Department, with a joint appointment in the Electrical Engineering Department of Columbia University. His research emphasis is on mathematical modeling of networking systems, bridging the gap between practice and analysis. He served as the Vice Chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University from 2009 to 2011, and in 2011 he spun out Infinio, a company in the area of data center storage. In the past he also cofounded CricInfo, which was subsequently acquired by ESPN. He received his undergraduate degree from IIT Bombay and MS and PhD degrees from the school of engineering at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which gave him a distinguished alumnus award in 2014. He is also the recipient of the NSF Career, DoE Career, IBM and Google Faculty awards.

Dates:
Tuesday, 13th August 2019 11:00-12:00