Winner In:
Best (Virtual) Event Technology Solution
IBM, with the USTA, designed, developed and launched the first-ever U.S. Open virtual fan experience, leveraging AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and hybrid cloud technologies, for the first ever spectator-less Grand Slam. This solution debuted: • Open Questions with Watson Discovery: Curating 7 iconic tennis debates, leveraging NLP to deliver pro/con arguments in interactive debate formats. This offering required some NLP breakthroughs including the ability to make sense of colloquialisms, idioms, dialects and industry specific terms. • Match Insights with Watson Discovery: Delivered fact-based insights on opponents ahead of match play leveraging Natural Language Generation technology from IBM Research. The technology was “self-learning” and evolved over the course of the tournament incorporating 2020 unfolding results. • AI Sounds: Recreating crowd-sounds captured during last years’ tournament, and dynamically serving-up crowd reactions based on similar play in 2020. AI sounds was available to the USTA and ESPN throughout the entire 2020 tournament to enrich the environment of matches coming from the two main courts, that were spectator-less, throughout the tournament. Open Questions synthesizes a point of view from a wide range of data sources including – Watson Discovery, a custom News Archive Collection, US Open custom collection, Wikipedia and fan input – and uses novel argumentative mining techniques to produce human-like narrations that adapt and evolve to include input from fans. This solution was available online and via mobile devices and capable of securely connecting millions of fans globally in real time. Over the course of the two-week tournament the solution successfully thwarted more than 104 million security events representing 1.1 million attacks with Watson for Cybersecurity