Courtesy of IBM I’m on the way to Wimbledon and the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) today to meet up with my #dontneedroads partner in crime, Dave Metcalfe. Like today, I was their guest 4 years ago, and I’m looking forward to revisiting “the bunker” under the courts where an army of IBM experts are working with AI, cloud and onsite technology to support the club, the players, the audience on site, the audience around the world and AELTC’s partners. Here’s my report from 4 years ago, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s changed for 2019.
The IBM AELTC relationship actually goes back 30 years. The IT support has evolved over the decades and now includes an award winning website, a truly comprehensive smartphone app, and a whole array of up to the second video and information services aimed at making the experience of the fans, the players and the viewing and listening public better each year. One key factor is security. Last year at the championships IBM detected and blocked over 200 million cybersecurity events, and IBM has to be ready for even more threats trying to disrupt or subvert the show this year.
One of the new additions for this year is AI powered video highlights for us tennis fans using the app and the website. There is too much output for manual editing of highlights in near real time, so IBM’s Watson technology comes in to play. The AI has been taught to better recognise acoustics and understand inadvertent bias. Not all highlights are equal. A highly passionate crowd favourite could generate more excitement than a more reserved yet equally skilled opponent, so Watson has been taught to pick and choose to increase the quality of the video output.
As well as supporting those of us who are lucky enough to have a ticket to be there, or have super fast broadband to watch online, there is a world audience out there with different circumstances. For example 900 million fans in India, most with limited bandwidth. IBM and Wimbledon have developed a progressive web app to provide a good service for that audience too.
Four years ago I met Alexandra Willis using analytics to make real time decisions on what content should go to the app or the website, or spotting an incident that might be a great opportunity to pull in one of the sponsors. It was impressive back then and I’m guessing things will have progressed dramatically with more AI help.
Of course I hope to see some tennis between the tech too. Johanna Konta is second on No. 1 Court where we’ve got tickets. I’ll be tweeting, making notes and using my camera, but I’m looking forward to hearing “Play”.
Check back here for the next posts about my Wimbledon experiences today.