Artificialintelligence for sports fans

If you're a fantasy football fan, you'll know how much time it can take to pore over reams of statistics every week, only to have your carefully chosen team limp from their virtual field, a defeated rabble. To get an advantage over their opponents, fantasy sports players tap into many resources. But if players are all using the same resources -- stats, online guides, commentaries -- who's really getting ahead? With the USA's National Football League (NFL) kicking off in September, a startup called Edge Up Sports is jostling to offer fantasy footballers the upper hand by recruiting an unconventional expert coach to its team: the artificial intelligence system, IBM Watson. While Deakin University's partnership with Watson enhances students' experiences by providing essential information, Edge Up Sports is using the platform to mine player interviews, social media analysis and injury reports and then to quantify them as statistical success indicators for NFL players.