Wimbledon Championships 2019:- AI Makes a Seismic Shift in Their Traditions

Published 07/01/2019, 9:10 AM EDT

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It’s the time of the year again, to have strawberries, cream and Pimms in the lawns of All England Lawn Tennis Club as Wimbledon Championships 2019 has got underway. And this year, Wimbledon’s AI technology is an addition on the courts of SW19. The AI-powered system would automate the match highlights and the exciting instances from the match for tennis followers.  

Over the past 30 years, the American hardware giant, IBM has been a part in reinventing tennis at its Mecca. The AI and cloud innovations will be making the Wimbledon Championships 2019 more efficient and insightful over the course of two weeks.

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The IBM Watson technology will monitor body instincts of the players and their gestures made while missing a volley till slamming a winner on the match point. Everything will be traced using a live video stream. IBM perceives that the passionate crowd is the best judge to determine the excitement involved in the point and hence a microphone on the umpire’s chair will detect the crowd’s reaction on each point.

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With the help of Watson Open Scale, all the points will be ranked according to the crowd’s response and player’s reaction. With this, the team of 180 people employed for Wimbledon’s AI section will generate the highlights of the match in less than two minutes of time. IBM Watson is accessible on ten courts of AELTC and it will be functioning for ten hours during the course of two weeks.

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Wimbledon’s AI unit head, Sam Seddon had a word with ‘The Telegraph’. He mentioned that IBM Watson curtails the time on analyzing the match and reduces the effort in distinguishing the critical moments which was pitched in by the digital editors.

Also, the bias in searching for highlights has also evaded. Now they just have to fine tune the data provided by IBM Watson (which records and ranks the exciting instances from the match) before publishing the highlights of the match.

“IBM Watson allows us to turn around highlights very quick for fans to watch online. It gives them control to watch and follow the matches and players they are most interested in,” head of communications, content, and digital at the AELTC said.

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Mahalakshmi Murali

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Mahalakshmi Murali joined EssentiallySports in 2018 as a tennis author and has gone on to pen more than 1800 engaging articles, probing into various aspects of the sport and its illustrious players. With her expertise on the sport, Mahalakshmi has interviewed stalwarts from the sport such as Serena WIlliams’ coach Patrick Mouratoglou and Kevin Anderson’s physio, Carlos Costa. Equipped with her vast experience and a keen understanding of the sport, Mahalakshmi now co-heads the tennis department.
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