IBM brings the future of sports to the 2020 US Open
Rick is joined on this Wireless Wednesday exclusive by Noah Syken, who is responsible for leading the Strategy and Partnerships related to IBM's global sponsorship portfolio and oversees IBM’s work with sports tournaments and organizations. He shares information about the work IBM is doing with sports including how new technologies are impacting the fan experience, examples of IBM’s partnerships with major sporting events, and the future of sports, as IBM sees it. A focus here is on the 2020 US Open.
Have a watch:
Some of what IBM is bringing to the 2020 US Open:
Open Questions with Watson Discovery: To give fans a way to engage remotely in iconic sports rivalries, IBM will facilitate debates among fans on USOpen.org. Starting with questions like who is the best player of all time, who is the top US Open Champion and more, IBM will use Watson's natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to scour millions of online sources and then, using IBM Research technology, it will deliver a debate-like pro/con argument. Fans will also be able to share their opinions on the questions, adding to the debate.
USOpen.org Match Insights presented by IBM: Match Insights with Watson Discovery is an AI-powered “cheat sheet” available to fans for every match. Match Insights uses NLP technology to search for and understand millions of articles, blogs, statistics and more. It pulls key insights from that mountain of data and converts it into a brief narrative form, enabling every fan to get insights from information ahead of matches.
Crowd Sounds: When faced with the prospect of no fans in attendance, the USTA, ESPN and IBM embarked on a collaborative journey to bring authentic crowd sounds into the presentation of matches. IBM leveraged its AI Highlights technology to recreate crowd sounds gleaned from hundreds of hours of video footage captured during previous US Opens. AI Highlights uses Watson technology to digest match footage and rank the excitement level of each point to create highlights in near-real time and classify specific crowd reactions. That insight has been reimagined to deliver real crowd sounds to the stadium and broadcast producers’ arsenals.