Cricket is the second most popular sports in the world and it has more than 2.5 billions fans overall in the world. There are the different medium through which it has been streamed such as live streaming on television or internet (e.g. Hotstar), ball by ball scores on mobile application (e.g. Cricbuzz), live commentary over radio etc. One of the tech enthusiast in the field of sports, Shahid Rasool (Founder and CEO of Cricingif) believes that GIFs can also be a great medium to engage with live cricket.

I am Parth Rana, data science enthusiast and a graduate student at Northeastern University, Boston, feel the same about GIFs as Shahid Rasool. Being a data enthusiast, I am working on a project where I am trying to develop a machine learning model which automatically generates GIFs in real-time by understanding live streaming of a cricket match. GIFs in this blog are generated by my system using World Cup 2019 Super-Over video.

Think about the time when you are travelling by train or bus, busy in some work or in an area when there is low connectivity of the internet. In all such situations, even though you have a subscription of live streaming, you are going to miss important moments.

Here this innovation solves this problem since GIFs are small in memory size compared to videos and this system can generate it instantaneously. Live GIFs can be a great add on for mobile applications which just shows the score and written commentary. As a viewer, you can enjoy real-time GIFs along with scorecard and written commentary. Such applications are having more than 100 million downloads on the Android Play Store having more than 50 million active users during the season.

I am looking to perform pilot testing of my project on some platform as described above where the model will generate GIFs along with commentary and score of the platform. Cricket / Sports enthusiast and people who want to contribute can contact me. Many exciting things yet to come.

Open for feedback and Happy to Collaborate!!

Contact me on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/parth-rana

Credit and Acknowledgement:

1) video credit: Willow Public Video

2) Thanks to Yatharth Vaishnani for technical support and Savan Patel for content writing.