IBM and ESPN take fantasy football to the next level with Watson AI

Millions of ESPN Fantasy Football players are rolling into week 13 of the NFL hoping to survive injuries and bye weeks on their way to the playoffs. But starting last season, players could also count on the trusty advice of Watson, IBM's artificial intelligence platform, in times of need. ESPN's Daniel Dopp, co-host of "The Fantasy Show with Matthew Berry" on ESPN, sat down with IBM Master Inventor Aaron Baughman at the IBM Innovation Lab in New York City to discuss Watson's foray into the arcane science of fantasy football. "It helps to have a compromise between the heart and the brain. We trained Watson on millions of fantasy football stories, blog posts and videos. We taught it to develop a scoring range for thousands of players with their upsides and their downsides. And we taught it to estimate the chances a player will exceed their upside or fall below the downside," Baughman said.