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Rick is joined by Noah Syken of IBM this week on iHeartRadio to talk about what IBM is doing at the 2020 US Open.
We all know the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every aspect of daily life, and sports for both fans and players have not been spared. As we adjust to a new reality, some sports are finding ways to slowly return under new rules and circumstances. At the same time, fans are looking for ways to engage with their favorite leagues, tournaments, teams and players. In fact, a recent IBM survey on sports and technology showed that nearly half of sports fans said having an interactive digital experience has become more important to them since the COVID-19 outbreak, highlighting the importance of creating new technology for fans.
Listen to Rick and Noah as they talk technology, tennis and more…
Here is some of what is going on:
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.
