LONDON, June 13, 2019 /CNW/ -- The All England Lawn
Tennis Club (AELTC) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today continued the
pledge of their partnership to leverage disruptive innovation to
elevate and differentiate the iconic traditional tennis
tournament.
Announcing a series of innovations for The Championships 2019
across AI and Cloud, maximising the opportunities presented by
IBM's core strategic capabilities, the 30-year-old partners
maintained the importance of challenging the status quo through
technology.
For 30 years, IBM has worked in partnership with the AELTC
year-round and during The Championships to deliver everything from
IT operations to fan facing digital properties, including the
latest apps and the award-winning Wimbledon website. IBM helps Wimbledon use AI to make processes more
efficient, to make experiences more insightful, and ensure The
Championships runs safely and securely for its critical three-week
period.
New for 2019: Enhanced AI-powered automated video highlights
for Wimbledon fans. Not all
highlights during a tennis match are equal for example, a
highly passionate crowd favourite could generate more excitement
than a more reserved yet equally skilled opponent. As a
learning system, Watson has been
taught to better recognise acoustics and understand inadvertent
bias increasing the quality of the output. With sound analysis from
Watson Acoustics, the system can now recognise when the ball has
been struck, allowing a tighter
cropping of highlight clips saving vital time and maximising every
second of rights footage. Using Watson Open Scale, the system can
now recognise levels of noise and excitement levels of players,
allowing it to remove bias when
searching for highlights from players with a particularly vocal
following or those who are particularly animated on court.
New for 2019, IBM and Wimbledon have developed a progressive web
app to provide a service for Wimbledon audiences in territories with lower
bandwidth and less developed mobile hardware. Acknowledging that
over 900 million fans in India for
example, express an interest in Wimbledon, the new progressive web app is
designed to provide a lightweight experience to ensure that fans in
those territories can make sure they don't miss out on the latest
scores and results.
IBM works with the AELTC to deliver everything from design
capability (via IBM iX), to building and integrating the latest
systems and applications. IBM ensures the continuous availability
and scalability of Wimbledon's
digital properties by securing Wimbledon to the core. For example, during the
2018 Championships IBM detected and blocked over 200 million
suspicious security events. IBM has over 200 of its people
dedicating their skills and expertise to helping Wimbledon in its pursuit of greatness;
delivering award-winning solutions built on years of global sports,
media and industry expertise.
"For 30 years we have been working with Wimbledon to introduce new technologies that
enhance fan experience. For more than a century, IBM has
responsibly ushered into the world revolutionary technologies,
building enterprise solutions that are trusted as part of our DNA,
and we are dedicated to delivering AI systems that are built
responsibly. It seems fitting that to mark the 30th year
of our partnership, one of the new innovations for The
Championships, Wimbledon 2019 will
be eliminating bias in creation of the video highlights package."
Sam Seddon IBM Wimbledon Client Executive.
"For 30 years, IBM's technology innovations have been at the
heart of our efforts to continuing our journey towards a great
digital experience that ensures we connect with our fans globally
wherever they may be watching and from whatever device that may be.
Our partnership with IBM is critical to us in helping us to disrupt
the traditional perceptions of Wimbledon through innovative, world-class uses of technology, in particular,
enabling us to place content with fans where they want to consume
it and acknowledge the ever-increasing focus on video and new
content formats." Alexandra Willis,
Head of Communications, Content and Digital, AELTC.
Notes to Editors:
To find out more about what
Wimbledon, IBM and other sporting
organisations believe to be the five strategic tenets for success
in the sports industry, visit
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/think/2019/06/the-next-competitive-edge-in-sport/
For further information please contact:
IBM External Communications
Emma Bennett
Emma.bennett@uk.ibm.com
+44 (0)7976 839109
AELTC Communications, +44 (0)20 8971 2468 or
communications@aeltc.com
#wimbledon
www.wimbledon.com
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SOURCE IBM