Like it or loathe it, IBM is now just as much a part of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships as strawberries and cream, having sponsored the event for the past 30 years, but this year it is going one step further with a raft of new artificial intelligence features to enable fans to engage for the complete game, set and match experience.
For the 2021 tournament, which starts next week, new elements include a “Power Ranking” player leaderboard and personalised guides for spotting new tennis talent. These will be available through the Wimbledon website and official mobile apps.
The Power Rankings tool uses IBM Watson to analyse player performance and provide a daily update in the form of a leaderboard.
It will focus on a player’s most recent match history, combining advanced statistical analysis, the natural language processing of IBM Watson, and IBM Cloud to analyse daily performance data, mine media commentary, and measure player momentum tournament to tournament and match to match.
A series of predictive insights will then be generated, such as a “Ones to Watch” feature; an upset alert, where the Power Rankings favour a lower-seeded player; and win probability for each match.
Similarly, there is also a Watson-based feature for pre-match insights, which was first used at the 2020 US Open. This will include a fact sheet for every main draw singles match with AI-generated content for player insights that inform fans on current player performance stats ahead of each match.
The fact sheet will also feature an “In the Media” section that taps into IBM Watson Discovery to create a custom news archive, and natural language processing to extract key details about each player from trusted news sources.
The final innovation is dubbed “Personalised Recommendations and Highlights Reels”, which are created through a Rules-Based Recommendation Engine integrated seamlessly across Wimbledon’s digital platforms. This will feature recommended players picked for each fan, to help them to discover new players by making suggestions based on their current favourite ones.
IBM UK’s sports partnership lead Kevin Farrar said: “With reduced capacity on-site at Wimbledon this year, that digital engagement is more important than ever, and by leveraging AI and hybrid cloud technologies, fans can get the experiences they are used to – no matter where they watch the tournament.”
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