As the thousands of high-flying dunks, alley oops and fadeaway jumper clips come out of NBA All-Star weekend, chances are the highlights were created by artificial intelligence. The league says they are using machine learning to create more highlights than ever before this All-Star weekend. Since 2014, the NBA has been employing and experimenting with technology from an Israeli company called WSC Sports to analyze key moments of each game and spit out some of the best highlights. As social media has emerged as an important destination to reach fans, the need for more and customized highlights has grown. This All-Star weekend, the software will automatically create multiple clips and content for every single player.

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.

In the 20 years I've been traveling to IBC, I've tried to seek out new technology, work practices and trends that could benefit my clients and help them be more competitive. One thing that is perennially exciting about this industry is the rapid pace of change. Certainly, from a post production point of view, there is a mini revolution every three years or so. In the past, those revolutions have increased image quality or the efficiency of making those images. The current revolution is to leverage the power and flexibly of cloud computing.

For two weeks every summer, the centre of the tennis world is in the London suburb of Wimbledon. Millions of tennis fans follow the action. They want scores, they want player and tournament information. And they want the highlights. With an average of three matches per day on each of the six main show courts, hundreds of hours of video can quickly mount up.

The Wimbledon tennis tournament, which starts next week, will use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help compile its highlights packages this year. The All England Lawn Tennis Club and technology partner IBM said the Watson AI platform had been taught to recognise players' emotions, which it would combine with an analysis of crowd noise, players' movements and match data to help compile highlight reels. Reuters reports that IBM's Sam Seddon said it was using machine learning to find moments where players had a heightened sense of emotion after a key point or tough rally. If you've got the visual element from the player, and you know that it's a tight pressure point in the match, then those are the points that you are going to really target in on in the highlights package," he said. He said the technology will also analyse the noise of the crowd to gauge its excitement.

Artificial Intelligence has got us all thinking about the different possibilites we could face in the way in which we live our lives and complete daily tasks. That future still has a massive question mark over it. The immediate future that doesn't have a question mark over it is the start of the 2018 World Cup! The World Cup has generated so much attention and as a football fan myself, it is definitely an exciting time for me. The platforms are endless in terms of where we can keep up to date with football stories, live updates as well as images and video content.

Demonstrating the continual innovation that takes place around its major sporting events, IBM Research and IBM iX are teaming up to provide "Cognitive Highlights" to The Championships, Wimbledon, the oldest tennis tournament in the world, to demonstrate how AI technology can scale and accelerate the video production process for any media, sports or entertainment company. It was in April that IBM Research and IBM iX first explored this project, creating the first ever multi-modal system for analyzing golf video for the 2017 Masters Golf Tournament. The proof-of-concept brought together computer vision and other leading AI technologies to listen, watch and learn from a live video feed of the golf tournament and automatically identify and curate the most exciting moments and shots into segments that could be used in online highlight packages. The solution for Wimbledon will go beyond selecting and curating individual segments for a video editor to choose from, to automatically creating a one to two minute highlights package of matches for the Wimbledon editorial team's use across the Wimbledon Digital Platforms, and which will be available shortly after each match. Moreover, instead of a four-day tournament at The Masters, IBM will contend with a 13-day championship at The All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club that starts next Monday July 3rd.

Supporters can get information on a range of topics, including where to eat and drink or the nearest place to buy a Wimbledon towel. Three public wi-fi hotspots - also new for 2017 - will facilitate the process, and Wimbledon and IBM will monitor the questions Fred is asked to provide an improved service for next year. Supporters not at the All England Club but following the tournament will also be offered an improved experience this year. Wimbledon 2017 will see the launch of automated highlights packages, generated using IBM Watson and other video and audio technologies. An Artificial Intelligence system will pick out the key moments of the match based on analysis of crowd noise, players' facial expressions and a knowledge of when the clutch moments like set and break points took place.

Automated highlights, augmented reality and an all-knowing chatbot called'Ask Fred' are among the new innovations from the the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) and IBM at this year's Championships. The AELTC and IBM announced on Tuesday that they are introducing a raft of innovations for the 2017 tournament in order to engage existing supporters and try to expand the tournament's global audience. 'Ask Fred' - named after Britain's legendary three-time Wimbledon champion Fred Perry - is enabled by IBM's Watson technology and offers a cognitive assistant to answer questions from fans visiting the event. Supporters can get information on a range of topics, including where to eat and drink or the nearest place to buy a Wimbledon towel. Three public wi-fi hotspots - also new for 2017 - will facilitate the process, and Wimbledon and IBM will monitor the questions Fred is asked to provide an improved service for next year.

The Wimbledon Tournament is 150 years old. It is as quintessentially English as strawberries and cream, Hugh Grant, and Queen Elizabeth. But that's not to say that it's stuck in the past -- thanks to a partnership with IBM, Wimbledon is using Watson to automate key parts of the iconic tennis event. One area where this is most apparent is in the editorial side of the iconic tennis tournament. Previously, the task of creating highlight packages and annotating photographs would be the responsibility of a human.