IBM’s sponsorship of the US Open will give the company an opportunity to showcase their new analytic technology called the U.S. Open PointStream, which is a new match analysis feature which will be made available for viewers on the U.S. Open Web site.
IBM boast that with PointStream, viewers can: access deep analysis spelling out what each player needs to do to increase their chances of winning a match, how the match is going in real time and when the momentum is shifting.
According to IBM, the PointStream feature displays key dimensions of an individual match, including an assessment of how the two players have performed against each other in the past. Additionally, PointStream identifies three Keys to the Match for each player.
While the match goes on, PointStream displays scoring as it happens and statistics such as aces, unforced errors and winners. It also tracks each player’s on-going performance against the Keys to the Match.
PointStream identifies potential turning points and show a “confidence meter” that tells how confident PointStream is that it is spotting momentum shifts accurately. It’s all part of IBM’s plan to build what they term as a smarter planet and it sounds like IBM has built on Watson.
Aside from turning the sport into a reality video game; with PointStream IBM has also provided bettors with a plethora of information. By gathering more than 39 million data points from play at the four Grand Slam tournaments going back five years, IBM engineers have built a sophisticated database that uses a powerful predictive analytics engine to identify the Keys to the Match.
It will be interesting to see just how accurate PointStream is during the US Open and whether it can actually be used to predict the outcome of a match.
