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Better. Faster. Smarter

Impact of artificial intelligence ranges from media to fan experience to performance

IBM's artificial intelligence technology at Wimbledon will use factors such as player gestures and crowd reaction to build highlight clips.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES; ILLUSTRATION BY LIZ SPANGLER
When the All England Club begins the Wimbledon tournament next week, there will be a modern new arrival to the event’s long-held manners and traditions such as strawberries and cream, royal patronage and white playing attire: IBM’s artificial intelligence technology.

IBM, Wimbledon’s longtime digital partner, will be testing a machine learning-based highlight system that automatically cuts and edits video clips based on crowd noise, player gestures, lead changes, broadcaster inflections and other cues, with clips created in a matter of seconds without human intervention. The company also experimented with its “cognitive highlights” system earlier this year at the Masters, using some elements of its now-famous Watson technology, and is among those standing at the forefront of artificial intelligence in sports.

“Sports is a really fertile area for artificial intelligence, and the opportunities now are only limited by one’s imagination,” said Noah Syken, IBM vice president of global sponsorships and client programs.

“Even the Masters seems like it was years ago, and that was just in April. But this is an exciting space where things are moving really fast, and is changing how people interact with sports and how we can tell stories,” Syken said.

IBM’s machine-based highlight system is one small segment of the fast-growing realm of artificial intelligence in sports, one now touching nearly every major facet of the business. The technology is intersecting with online, social and broadcast media operations, the in-stadium fan experience through digital concierges and other amenities (see related story), sports gambling and merchandise sales, and helping fuel a similar advance in team and league analytics, both in business-side operations and player personnel. Even Siri and its voice-activated commands to pull up last night’s scores on your iPhone is a form of artificial intelligence.

IBM technology at the Masters used commentary and crowd cheering to build highlights.
“The rate of innovation in this space is pretty crazy now,” said Robbie Allen, founder and executive chairman of Automated Insights, an early pioneer in the artificial intelligence space that used natural language generation to automatically create human-sounding narratives. The company’s auto-generated news and sports articles have been used for years by a wide array of media outlets. “I think we’re now really at the cusp of some really cutting-edge breakthroughs.”

Allen is so taken by what is happening in artificial intelligence that earlier this year he stepped back from his role as chief executive of Durham, N.C.-based Automated Insights to enroll in a doctorate program in computer science at the University of North Carolina.

“I didn’t really think I’d be headed back to academia, but there is so much happening that I wanted to think about all of this in a bigger and broader way,” he said. “I think we’re going to be looking back 10 years from now at this 2015-2020 period as a really interesting time for the development of AI.”

The convergence of several key technological and industry developments are fueling the acceleration in artificial intelligence technology in sports:

• marked improvement by teams and leagues generating and collecting data, as artificial intelligence systems thrive on larger sets of information.

• rise in more powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) computer systems.

• heightened ability of those systems to deal with unstructured data such as video, photos, text and social media.

“The ultimate goal of all of this is to be able to understand each fan on a truly individual level and really personalize the sports experience for each of them, rather than just segmenting them into various groups,” said James Carwana, general manager of the Intel Sports Group. The technology giant is another active player in the development of artificial intelligence, particularly around the use of analytics.

“There are particularly challenges with time and competing for a fan’s attention in any given moment, so we see a big opportunity in using AI to help surface the right piece of content, the right type of experience when that moment for engagement emerges,” Carwana said.

Playing the odds

Unanimous A.I., a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company, last year correctly predicted the top-four finishers in the Kentucky Derby using its “swarm intelligence,” a form of AI it developed that seeks to amplify aggregated human opinion or focus groups. The company describes its swarms as something of an artificial intelligence-powered tug of war that measures not only fan sentiment, but also the level of confidence and flexibility in those positions.

After some early and well-publicized success in picking winners in the Derby and last year’s Oscars, Unanimous A.I. is now expanding its efforts, regularly publishing predictions for numerous sports on its blog and selling insights and forecasts to several undisclosed teams and other sports and entertainment entities such as Red Bull Media House.

In your opinion, in what area of sports business could artificial intelligence have the biggest impact?

 AI will have the greatest impact on athlete training, heath and rehabilitation. This will lead to optimization of how and when to train, when to get rest and when to get back on the field of play — leading to better performance, less time on the DL and longer careers.

— Mike Wilhelm, Momentum Worldwide 

Artificial intelligence can have a profound impact both on and off the field. On the field, data collected from wearable technology can revolutionize performance. Off the field, leagues and teams can tailor content and messaging to consumers based on their behavior.
— Paul Bamundo,  
Ivy League Sports Marketing

Artificial intelligence has the opportunity to dramatically change the way we communicate to our patrons and our fans. AI will open the doors to individualized consumer experiences.
— Michael Jennings,
On Location Experiences

Creation of more content and more fan consumable data. Ability to simulate live action by fans.
— Rob Keith, Partnership Sports Marketing

Group EA Sports [games] have driven many kids from their couches to the field to try and perform skills they saw on FIFA and watch their heroes in stadiums. I think AI technology can have a similar impact.
— Steve Powell, Houston Dynamo 

Crowd, parking and traffic management could be improved with AI. Communicating to fans about better routes, parking with available spaces or enhanced exit strategies based on where you want to go as well as which gates or concession stands have shortest entry/wait times.
— Michael Cross, Penn State  

The biggest challenge we face as consumers is managing all the information available to us. An AI-powered virtual assistant that provides us with suggestions based on our actual behavior or desired outcomes has the potential to improve our quality of life.
— Mike Burch, Speedway Motorsports Inc.

Source: Turnkey Sports & Entertainment


“We still have a long way to go in this space. It’s still [in its] very early days,” said Louis Rosenberg, Unanimous A.I. chief executive. “But these systems are only getting smarter, and the accuracy of these predictions is now very strong.”

Not surprisingly, predicting and analyzing team and player performance — either in a player personnel, media content or gambling context powering sportsbook operations — is a key element of artificial intelligence in sports. Sportradar is among those actively involved in each of those camps, building significantly from its core business in sports data collection and distribution.

In its work with the NBA, for example, its systems can now reliably estimate the probability of a player scoring based on where on the court he shot the ball, using the player’s own prior shot data and information from elsewhere in the league. So not only can a player be measured using shooting percentages, but analyzed based on the quality of shot choices they are making as well.

“That’s a statistical model that we built that’s obviously helpful to teams and their coaches, but that also can help create storytelling products and content in an automated fashion,” such as statistically oriented stories and highlights created automatically and distributed through partner platforms, said Ashok Balakrishnan, Sportradar senior vice president of technology and product management.

But among the fastest-growing segments of artificial intelligence in sports is fraud detection and integrity services around gambling. Companies such as Sportradar and London-based Genius Sports analyze real-time betting patterns around the world and look to isolate trends that would potentially signal match fixing or other suspicious behavior. Major sports entities such as FIFA, the NBA and NHL now use integrity systems such as these that rely heavily on artificial intelligence.

“The integrity piece of this is obviously a very quant-driven, very deep piece of the business,” Balakrishnan said. “That requires running multiple statistical models together to be able to recognize patterns and identify them in real time.”

Open environment

Unlike several other highly secretive or proprietary forms of technology development, the rise of artificial intelligence has been marked by a much more collegial atmosphere within the industry. Many practitioners in the emerging space credit a robust research and collaboration environment in which Silicon Valley giants are regularly publishing research, in turn aiding the development of smaller players.

Facebook operates an online portal titled Facebook AI Research (FAIR) that includes a variety of research papers and publications around artificial intelligence. Google, similarly, maintains its own hub for research and development in machine intelligence. The two companies dominate the digital advertising market, and have been key figures in the rise of artificial intelligence.

Other major technology companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Cisco and Intel are also publishing articles and research, as well as striking partnerships with colleges and universities.

“There’s a lot of research being shared around the community which has really created a wellspring of activity,” Allen said.

Balakrishnan similarly credited an ability within the artificial intelligence space to freely share open-source software, enabling others to experiment with it.

“That’s really opening up a lot of advances,” he said.


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