72 FUTURESHOCK Wimbledon/IBM Watson
PARTICULARLY NOWWITH SOCIAL MEDIA, THEY WANT TO BE ABLE TO GET THOSE CLIPS OUT AS FAST AS POSSIBLE
company also builds Wimbledon’s digital platforms, including the websites, phone apps, Apple TV and, this year, a new Facebook chatbot, which lets fans check in on scores or even find out where to buy strawberries around the Wimbledon venue. DATA MATCH Wimbledon has a surprisingly long history with artificial intelligence. The collaboration with IBM began when IBM’s Watson technology was used to gather up and ingest social media mentions around the tournament. Posts were analysed for sentiment – positive or negative – around individual players and the matches. Last year, IBM and Wimbledon rolled out what they call Cognitive Highlights. Wimbledon wanted to create highlights packages out of matches, condensing a three-hour match down to a two-
minute video. This was something they had previously done using human video editors who would watch the match, make selections of the interesting moments and then edit together a highlights sequence. “Obviously, that takes someone quite a long time to do,” observes Boyden. “It means you can only do a certain number of matches, and it means that it takes quite a long time after the end of the match to produce that highlights package. Particuarly now with social media, they want to be able to get those clips out as fast as possible after the match. So what we did was, essentially, teach IBM Watson how to get excited about tennis. “We know that a break point is an interesting point. We know that a match point, a set point, those are interesting points, but we also taught IBM Watson
how to understand crowd noise. So you know when the crowd goes bananas that was an interesting point. Likewise, we taught it about player gestures, so when players are punching the air or are visibly excited we know that was probably a crucial point. And we use all that to rate
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