For two weeks in July, the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) hosts Wimbledon, the game's most prestigious tournament. IBM has partnered with the club for greater than three a long time, enhancing coverage of the championships and delighting fans with wealthy data-driven insights. This yr, among the tournament's most compelling stories will probably be told using IBM® watsonx™, the enterprise-grade generative AI platform.
How watsonx keeps Wimbledon fans up up to now
The latest Catch Me Up feature, available on the Wimbledon app and website, provides AI-generated summaries for every individual player – with descriptions of what happened of their last match and the challenges they face in the subsequent. Users can personalise their Catch Me Up list by adding their favourite players. When matches are live or video highlights can be found, Catch Me Up provides relevant links.
The Catch Me Up feature not only shows app users the match results of their favorite players, but additionally takes into consideration recency, geolocation and rankings to offer additional relevant content. It also creates an outline map that captures key storylines, highlights and previews of upcoming matches.
Benefits behind the scenes
The Catch Me Up feature saves Wimbledon's editorial team many hours of time, freeing them up to put in writing more engaging stories and tackle more vital tasks. Behind the scenes, the method begins with gathering an enormous amount of knowledge from player rankings and momentum to games played and sets. This structured and unstructured data is managed by IBM® watsonx.data™, an information store built on an open lakehouse architecture that permits flexible, scalable access by applications on the club's hybrid cloud servers. Using a model trained and tuned in IBM® watsonx.ai™, the generative AI application extracts and summarises relevant data and generates natural language stories tailored to Wimbledon's style and tone. The entire workflow is managed and monitored using IBM® watsonx.governance™ to make sure reliable, integrated performance.
Improving the preferred features through continuous collaboration
By working with IBM Consulting®, Wimbledon stays on the forefront of sporting event technology. Each yr, teams from IBM and the AELTC collaborate and co-design (using the IBM Garage® methodology) to bring the wonder and excitement of the tournament to life for tens of millions of fans world wide.
A shining example is IBM SlamTracker®. “SlamTracker has been the platform where you possibly can get your scores and stats for nearly 20 years,” says Sidell. “Over the last 18 months, we’ve worked with Wimbledon to create a brand new SlamTracker experience. In addition, we’re showcasing generative AI capabilities – among the snippets you see as a part of the player cards will now even be available in SlamTracker, with three bullet points for match previews and summaries generated by Watsonx.”
This yr, the implementation at Wimbledon will even expand SlamTracker to incorporate latest types of head-to-head data, including information on previous encounters and improved server-receiver visualizations.
An organization-wide technology roadmap
What's next on the technology roadmap? “This yr we're doing a proof of concept using multimodal AI models – a wide range of computer vision models that understand each video and pictures – so we are able to translate that into text,” says Sidell. “Our goal is to capture more of what happens between each point, during changeovers and between plays to create more contextual narratives across the players.” So perhaps next yr watsonx will help describe injury timeouts, weather-related delays and other game interruptions comparable to interactions with referees, ball girls and ball boys and activities within the Royal Box.
The collaboration between IBM Consulting and the Wimbledon teams goes beyond the digital platform for fans and features a company-wide transformation. “Some of Wimbledon’s sustainability leaders saw a demo of the IBM® Envizi platform showing how it might improve the monitoring and reporting of their carbon emissions and energy consumption data,” says Sidell. “That led to us implementing an instance of Envizi for the AELTC to watch the tournament this yr.” As the one Grand Slam tournament played on natural grass, it seems only fitting that Wimbledon is all the time one step ahead in the case of environmental issues.
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