IBM Renews US Open Deal For Five Years, Will Showcase Watson Media Unit

IBM renewed its US Open sponsorship for five years and announced a series of artificial intelligence initiatives tied to the tennis event under the banner of its new business unit, Watson Media. The core of the effort is cognitive highlights, which identify the matches' most important moments by analyzing on-court stats, sounds from the crowd and the reactions of a player using both action and facial expression recognition. The system then ranks the shots from seven US Open courts and auto-curates the highlights. IBM expects up to 1,000 highlights posted by the US Open on social media to be derived from cognitive highlights. IBM has been a US Open sponsor for 28 tournaments. The deal was done in-house, with negotiations led by U.S. Tennis Association CRO Lew Sherr and IBM VP/Global Sponsorships & Client Programs Noah Syken.