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Updated 09/03/2012 12:01 PM
Tech Beat: U.S. Open serves fans data through interactive wall
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Believe it or not, there used to be a day when the most high-tech innovation you'd find at the U.S. Open tennis tournament was the electronic scoreboard. Today, though, there are apps, whiz-bang fan experiences, and this year, the IBM Game Changer Interactive Wall. The wall turns a whole bunch of data and statistics into a whole bunch of new information for fans at this year's Open.
"Using analytics technologies, you're able to mine through that data, make insights, make better decisions, position yourself better against the competition or, in the case of the US Open, enhance that fan experience," John Kent with IBM said.
It does so by using data to tell you more about everything from the food to the weather to the popularity of players based on tweets. But the shining star of the wall is a feature that'll not only show you through players running on tennis balls who has the momentum in the match but also, based on certain criteria, will predict who's going to win.
"We're using our predictive analytics technology to look at the last seven years of data and mine that data, looking for patterns in that data, to determine the three keys any particular player has to make the matchup against the next player the most successful," Kent said. "So when any particular player hits all three of their keys, they tend to win the match more than 90 percent of the time."
While this type of data analytics obviously works well for sports, it's also used, whether you realize it or not, every day in other ways that probably have a much more profound effect on your life.
"Whether it's in the world of police work to correlate thousands and thousands of data points to look at where crime is happening and try to predict when the next incident is going to occur to looking at traffic, there's just so many uses for analyzing data," Kent says.
Though the wall is right now accessible only to fans at the U.S. Open, some of those statistics, including the ones that help predict who will win a match, are available through USOpen.org and via the new U.S. Open iPad app.