IBM and Wimbledon

IBM and the All-England Lawn Tennis Club today announced new ways for Wimbledon fans all around the world to experience The Championships online, using artificial intelligence (AI) powered by IBM Cloud and hybrid cloud technologies. The new features, which were co-created by the All-England Club and IBM for Wimbledon.com and the Wimbledon app, join a comprehensive suite of digital fan experiences, including the award-winning IBM Power Index with Watson, IBM Match Insights with Watson, Personalised Recommendations, and Highlights Reels, all aimed at keeping global audiences more informed and engaged with players, matches, and the tournament.

New features for 2022 include:

‘Win Factors’ brings enhanced explain ability to ‘Match Insights’: Building on the existing Match Insights feature of the Wimbledon app and Wimbledon.com, IBM is providing an additional level of explain ability into what factors are being analysed by the AI system to determine match insights and predictions. Win Factors will provide fans with an increased understanding of the elements affecting player performance, such as the IBM Power Index, court surface, ATP/WTA rankings, head-to-head, ratio of games won, net of sets won, recent performance, yearly success, and media punditry.

‘Have Your Say’ with a new interactive fan predictions feature: For the first time, users can register their own predictions for match outcomes on the Wimbledon app and Wimbledon.com, through the Have Your Say feature. They can then compare their prediction with the aggregated predictions of other fans and the AI-powered Likelihood to Win predictions generated by IBM.

The Wimbledon digital features are powered by IBM Watson and use a hybrid cloud strategy to maximise flexibility and efficiency by combining on-premises systems, private clouds, and IBM Cloud. For these digital interactions, IBM Cloud provides the foundation and scalability. It stores and processes match data, which is then put into AI models created with IBM Watson Studio and IBM Watson Discovery to provide insights to fans, commentators, and the media.

Alexandra Willis, Communications & Marketing Director, The All-England Club, said: “Leveraging technology to help fans become more informed, engaged, and involved throughout the Wimbledon Fortnight is at the core of our strategy to ensure we are leveraging innovation to keep Wimbledon relevant and deliver outstanding digital experiences for fans, wherever they may be. In partnership with IBM, we are thrilled to bring an even more dynamic and interactive digital experience to fans around the world this year as Wimbledon returns to full capacity. Core to these experiences is our ambition to help fans get closer to Wimbledon by understanding which players to follow and analyse and inviting them to get involved with new match predictions and insights features, alongside our extensive scoring, news, and video content across our channels.”

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