Note: This blog post was authored by Aaron Baughman with Stephen Hammer, Eythan Holladay, Eduardo Morales and Gary Reiss. Tennis play at the US Open consists of 254 matches in the men's and women's singles events totaling tens of thousands of points. During the tournament's two weeks, many matches are played in parallel, and it's virtually impossible for any tennis fan, or the editorial team at the United States Tennis Association (USTA), to capture any sizable percentage of the best points. To help solve this challenge, IBM built an AI system that clips and creates candidate highlight videos and assigns a fair excitement score, all within two minutes of the end of each match. Every highlight is ranked so that tennis fans and video editors at the USTA and its broadcast partners can see the most exciting points of the tournament, while minimizing the influence of player gestures, match analytic score, player rank, player age and crowd size.

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.

Note: This blog post was authored by Aaron Baughman with Stephen Hammer, Eythan Holladay, Eduardo Morales and Gary Reiss. Wimbledon is one of the most prestigious major events in the world. With over 675 matches played and over 147,000 tennis points played, its size and scale are substantial. In fact, even if fans diligently watch their favorite players, they will miss a high proportion of the played points. Wimbledon uses IBM digital and AI capabilities to provide rapid access to match highlights to serve up the best content to fans.