How IBM tweaked its Wimbledon highlight-picking AI to remove bias

IBM has been tweaking the AI-powered highlight picking algorithm it deploys during the Wimbledon tennis championships this year to take into account a wider array of factors to better find and personalise the best points to share with fans around the world. Big Blue is celebrating a 30-year technology partnership with the famous grass court tennis tournament, and in 2017 it unveiled an AI-powered system for picking the best points to insert into a highlights package, with the aim of delivering highlights "better than an international media organisation" as Sam Sneddon, IBM sports and entertainment lead, told Computerworld UK during a tour of its technology bunker on-site at the Championships this year. Whether it was Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer's five-hour epic mens' final, or Simona Halep's swift dismantling of Serena Williams in the ladies' final, IBM was working in the background to map and collect every second of footage before feeding it through a set of machine learning and deep learning algorithms which decide the points that would make for the best 5-10 minute highlight package. The Watson system analyses 39 factors, like player gestures and crowd reactions, from live footage and assigns an'excitement score'. For an idea of scale, IBM collects 4.5 million tennis data points per tournament.