73 FUTURESHOCK Wimbledon/IBM Watson
what the most exciting points of the match were.” Within a few minutes of the end of each match, IBM Watson has automatically produced an automated two-minute highlight clip, which, with minimal editorial tweaking, can be sent out directly to social media and other outlets. The social media team at Wimbledon is also able to access the AI-generated insights through a dashboard and post them ad hoc whether on social media or wimbledon.com Wimbledon has an agreement with broadcasters that they will keep their in-house video production to one hour of footage per day, so the ability to easily distil a match down to its essentials is a great asset. TRAINING FOR A WIN How does the AI training process actually work? How do you coach an AI? “IBM has some patents around this. We worked quite closely with our research groups to train models around crowd noise. At the highest level it’s the normal training of a neural network-based solution. We give it some examples of what crowd noise is like and examples of other noises in tennis, and we build a model that allows us to send each of those points into an API and it comes back with a rating for the level of crowd noise. We’ve done a similar thing around player gestures. “Once we’ve done that training, we more or less do things in a fully automated way. We know we have to adjust some things. There’s a certain level of bias, for example, toward British players playing at Wimbledon, because you tend to get more crowd noise around that.” IBM has turned its Wimbledon clip generation AI into a product, which it is adding to its offerings for other sports broadcasts, with implementations around FIFA football, Masters golf and the US Open Tennis Championships already under way. “It’s an emerging area. As broadcasters are looking to put more content out, and there is more content out there full stop, the ability to pick what is the most exciting is really relevant to a lot of different sports.” “This is something that is very cutting edge. We’ve moved this from something that was very bespoke for Wimbledon, and now we’re trying to put it into our products. That flows down and makes it a more ‘easy to use’ solution for everybody.” 150 YEARS OF IMAGES This year marked the 150th year of the Wimbledon tennis tournament. The IBM
W I M B L E D O N I N P I C T U R E S
THE CHAMPIONSHIPS 2 JULY - 15 JULY 2018
An AI mosaic of 8,400 photos, created with IBM Watson wimbledon.com/poster
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BUILDING UP THE FULL STORY In collaboration with IBM and Watson, Wimbledon’s 150-year anniversary poster is an intricate mosaic comprising still images of the tournament’s past, with each object made up from tiny photographs found in Wimbledon’s archive
and Wimbledon teams sat down together at a dinner to brainstorm something that could be a special collaboration to mark the anniversary. The result was the Wimbledon 150 year anniversary poster, which is a mosaic entirely composed of still images from past Wimbledon championships. This kind of mosaic has been done before – and is almost a cliché. But what made this year’s IBM Watson- produced poster unique was that the
objects in the poster’s depiction of the Wimbledon grounds were made up of tiny photographs from the Wimbledon archives of each object. “So when you zoom in on the umpire, you’ll see that they are made up of photos of umpires, ball boys are ball boys and umbrellas are umbrellas. It’s interesting that Wimbledon – with all its traditional background – has gone with such an interesting use of AI technology to celebrate 150 years.”
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