It’s my favorite time of the year, folks. It’s fantasy football playoff season. I’m coming off a high from winning both of my leagues last year, but I’ll have no such luck this year.
I’m in two leagues this year, but thanks to a 55-point performance from New Orleans Saints’ Quarterback Drew Brees, I was bounced out in the first round in one. In the other league, I snuck into the playoffs with a 6-7 record and I’m now moving onto the second round.
Both platforms I play on — ESPN and Yahoo —offer insights, data, projections and advice using artificial intelligence, with the former using insights from IBM Watson.
That lovely little machine has been helping fantasy team managers since last season since IBM taught Watson about football, relevant data points via natural language processing and media data mining. Watson pulls data from fantasy football stories, blog posts and videos and develops scoring projections for players and their chances of having a good game.
Watson will scour the internet for content about a player and tell you whether that conversation is positive or negative, helping you to make an informed decision.
Last month, IBM Master Inventor Aaron Baughman at a fireside chat in New York said Watson can help the internal struggle many fantasy owners face when trying to set their lineup.
“It helps to have a compromise between the heart and the brain,” he said. “We trained Watson on millions of fantasy football stories, blog posts and videos. We taught it to develop a scoring range for thousands of players with their upsides and their downsides. And we taught it to estimate the chances a player will exceed their upside or fall below the downside.”
Now, I’m not saying Watson is always perfect. In fact, he’s burned me a few times, but when I have the opportunity to keep my title and throw it in the faces of my friends, I’ll take all of the information I can get.
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Of course, fantasy football isn’t IBM’s only target. In fact, it’s really just one example of how AI can help your business.
“If Watson can be taught football, it can also be taught to read, say, patient histories, helping to correlate patterns that medical professionals might not see as clearly otherwise,” the company said on its website.
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