LONDON—Outside, it's about 35 degrees Celsius (95F) and close to 100 percent humidity. Hat-wearing tennis lovers fan themselves with genteelly flailing limbs, or whatever else they have to hand, while they sip on a cup of Pimm's. Down here, though, away from the punishing sun and thronging crowds, I'm bathed in the soothing susurration of servers (of the computer variety), and—more importantly—some really powerful air conditioning.
I'm standing in the operations bunker of the Wimbledon tennis championships, a couple of deep-underground rooms stuffed with IBM engineers and hardware. This is where all of the data—some 3.2 million new data points per championships—is processed by Watson and other big data technologies, for use by the commentators, the TV and Internet video feeds, and on the Wimbledon.com website and apps.
Upstairs, there are two or three people watching every tennis game—46 people in total. On the smaller courts, there are just two people: one to watch the action and call out the action, and one who inputs the data into a laptop. On the larger courts, there's a third person who manages extra data sources that aren't available on the smaller courts, such as the speed of the serves. There are also two people in the bunker who can correct erroneous calls, or fill in if there's a technical issue upstairs.
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