LONDON—This morning, as I masticated on an interestingly flavourless almond croissant and slurped down a very flavourful pot of bacon yoghurt topped with granola, both prepared by Chef Watson, execs from IBM and the All England Club outlined the technological advances that will underpin this year's Wimbledon tennis tournament.
Much of the presentation was spent talking about responsive Web design (wimbledon.com has been massively overhauled), but rather than bore you with that kind of stuff, we'll focus on the interesting bits that are going on behind the scenes that power Wimbledon's new website and apps.
One of the most interesting statistics provided at the event is that 3.2 million data points are captured during the two-week tennis tournament. These are captured by a mix of skilled data gatherers (i.e. people by the side of the court who are deciding if it was an unforced error or not), and automated data input via the Hawk-Eye camera system and other court-side sensors. This year, all of that data will be fed into big computers running IBM Watson and InfoSphere Streams.
Together, these systems can compare a new data point against tens of millions of previous data points, and if something novel has occurred—a new fastest serve, a record number of first serves in, etc.—a human-readable alert is produced. This notification, which is created "within a second or two," contains all of the relevant context ("the fastest serve since Joe Bloggs in 2010") of whatever novel event has just occurred. Then, some Wimbledon staff can take that snippet and do stuff with it: push it out to Twitter or Facebook, send a real-time update to the website or apps, etc.
It also sounds like commentators (or perhaps IBM staffers liaising with the commentators) will be able to manually type queries into Watson, to find out interesting insights.
Social media seems to be a big focus for Wimbledon this year, too—and again, IBM is more than happy to help out. Internally, the Wimbledon staff are using a "social media console" that collates thousands of tweets (up to 29,000 per minute for last year's men's final) and feeds them into some kind of insight engine. IBM says they can identify who the "big influencers" are; Wimbledon didn't say what it did with that data, but presumably it's helpful in driving up engagement somehow. While we're on the topic of social media: this year, for the first time, Wimbledon will be paying for promotion on Twitter and Facebook "to try and rise above the noise." As Wimbledon tells it, one of the most important aspects of their job is to maintain a certain level of brand cachet for the tournament and the club—and so promoted social media posts are one way of keeping things on-message.
During the Q&A session, a couple of interesting questions were mooted. With IBM and Wimbledon's infatuation with data, why not equip the players with wearable sensors? The short answer was "the players might not want that data made public." Someone asked about the lack of an Apple Watch app (there are new iOS and Android apps); Wimbledon's paraphrased response was "we're waiting to see how the smartwatch thing pans out."
Ultimately, though, words are cheap. A lot of the tech discussed today sounded cool, but we want to see it in practice. Wimbledon runs from June 29 to July 12, and hopefully we'll be there to actually try out some of the new tools and technologies. Personally, I can't wait to ask Watson whether Andre Agassi's hair really was vital to his grand slam victories.
Listing image by Sebastian Anthony
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