Indian multinational IT services and consulting company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is set for a beta testing of a new feature at New York City Marathon this year that will offer real-time predictions on race winners.
TCS, being the title sponsors of the iconic 48-year-old marathon, will leverage its data analytics platform Ignio for the first time to predict winners, Sporttechie.com has reported. Since TCS launched Ignio in 2015, the platform has used artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation to power enterprise IT services at major Fortune 500 companies.
In the 2018 edition of the TCS New York City Marathon, slated for November 4, the company will quietly deploy Ignio behind the scenes, out of the sight of marathon attendees and spectators on TV, and use data points, such as each professional racer’s historical performance and real-time analytics, to generate predictions on race outcomes.
TCS isn’t sure yet whether Ignio will make a public appearance this year. The system might be used to offer soundbites for the television broadcast, but Michelle Taylor, TCS’s head of sports sponsorships. said the company is beta testing Ignio in hopes of possibly integrating it within the app and broadcast in 2019. Further down the road, the company may have ambitions to gamify that data somehow, though it does not currently have plans to support sports gambling in any official capacity.
We wanted to apply the tool to the marathon in a way that could allow us to predict the probability of which pro athlete would win the race,” Taylor said. “We were looking at the race broadcast, thinking ‘How can we make this more engaging?’ Gambling is not the soul purpose of this, but people love guessing who is going to win and if we can leverage this cognitive automation tool and apply it to the marathon, it’d be interesting to see if we can predict the winners.”
If Ignio is rolled out in an official capacity in 2019, TCS will likely look to display the data in some sort of graphical way, whether as on-screen percentages or a ranking based on prediction data.
Separately, the marathon is debuting a number of new tools on the app that will aid runners and spectators and help make it the “most technologically-advanced marathon in the world,” said Michelle Taylor, TCS’s head of sports sponsorships.
Fans can anticipate a range of new features on the official marathon app. The biggest addition will be a tool that enables spectators to track their best routes around the race course so that they can catch the runners they want to see at as many spots as possible.
Users will see a map of the course that highlights all the spectator points. When they pick their first spot, all the other spots that are physically impossible to make in time will red out, allowing spectators to more easily plan their cheer routes ahead of time. The tool will then connect with Google Maps so that users can see the quickest and best way to get from point A to point B. It will additionally connect with an existing athlete tracker to show the real-time position of runners on the course, then alert spectators when they should leave to make their next location. Users should be able to reach three or four places during the race depending on how many runners they’re following and the cheer route they choose. Spectators can also set up a route that allows them to track and watch multiple runners.
Supplementing all of that functionality will be a new voice control feature integrated into the tracking tool that will enable users to look-up racers by talking directly to their phones.
TCS is also the title sponsor of Amsterdam Marathon and World 10K Bangalore and one of the sponsors of Berlin Marathon, Chicago Marathon, Boston Marathon, Mumbai Marathon. In India, it is the title sponsor of World 10K held in Bangalore every year.
TCS is a sponsor of Indian Premier League (IPL) team Rajasthan Royals since 2009. In addition, TCS provides Rajasthan Royals with technology to help in the analysis of player performance, simulation and use of RFID tags for tracking the players’ fitness levels and for security purposes in the stadiums.
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