IBM, partner digital exclusive to the Augusta National Golf Club (ANGC), presented yesterday ‘My Group’, an innovative digital experience that gives fans to the new golf ways to participate and display the tournament, revolutionizing the digital experience of the Masters 2020 allows For spectators anywhere in the world to create custom groups of players to follow throughout the tournament, leveraging the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of IBM Watson.
The 2020 Augusta Masters, the most important tournament on the PGA Tour that had to be postponed in March due to the pandemic, kicked off this Thursday offering viewers a virtual experience never before used in professional golf. ‘My Group’, which runs on the IBM Cloud, is available globally in the Augusta National Golf Club’s Masters apps and on Masters.com, and allows spectators to follow every shot of every golfer on every hole in detail during the tournament, a vision that fans will not have on the field due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The most relevant shots
With more than 90 golfers from around the world competing in the 2020 Masters, the new functionality developed by IBM will allow fans to follow top players like Jon Rahm, the Biscayan golfer who will fight for the title alongside Americans Tiger Woods. Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau. ‘My Group’ presents the highlights of the golfers leading the tournament and the most relevant shots of other rivals so that viewers do not miss a thing.
‘My Group’ is based on IBM Watson solutions developed in previous Masters, which have analyzed key data such as traditional golf statistics, shot tracking data or fan sounds, among others. During the 2019 tournament, Watson collected and analyzed nearly 20,000 individual videos of players’ shots. Taking this data into account, this year new AI models have been developed using reliable data from last year’s tournament, including a ranking with the emotion shown by the spectators in each shot and other data such as the player identification, the round, the hole, score, and tracking statistics like shot length. In total, 16 different models have been trained to ensure that the most relevant and personalized content about players is available to ‘My Group’ users.
AI and spectator noise levels
In this anomalous tournament without in-person spectators it is important to identify which shots are the most important so that spectators can see them in ‘My Group’. To identify the most important plays, IBM has built an AI model that analyzes the noise levels of the spectators, based on IBM Watson Studio and AutoAI, with machine learning technology. These audience uproar rating models will be used this year to automatically determine which live shots will feature prominently on the ‘My Group’ channel.
On the other hand, it is the first time that IBM has powered the 2020 Masters using a hybrid cloud approach enabled by Red Hat OpenShift. In previous years, many workloads were already operating in the cloud, but some, such as posting, scoring, and tournament staging, remained on-premises due to latency. In reaction to the pandemic, which required more data and workloads to be hosted in the cloud to increase efficiency, IBM has worked closely with the AGNC to direct those workloads to the IBM public cloud, using an architecture hybrid cloud to bring them together.
