IBM and the United States Tennis Association (USTA) have brought innovative new fan experiences to the US Open using AI underpinned by hybrid cloud technologies that will enable millions of people around the world to experience the excitement and vibrant debate surrounding the iconic tennis Grand Slam without being on-site.
In partnership with the USTA, IBM developed three unique and new tennis-based digital experiences:
Open Questions with Watson Discovery: To give fans a way to engage remotely in iconic sports rivalries, IBM will facilitate several debates among fans on USOpen.org. Starting with a question on hot tennis topics such as "Is Billie Jean King the most influential tennis player in history?", IBM will use the Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities in Watson Discovery to analyze millions of news and sports sources for insights. That unstructured data will be analyzed, summarized and ultimately delivered as pro and con arguments using IBM Research technology. Fans will also be able to share their opinions on the debates, and engage on topics they are passionate about. At IBM, NLP is critical to AI for business because it enables interpretation of the trends and insights hidden within large amounts of data - including charts, tables, PDFs, images and more.
