The Toronto Raptors are using IBM’s Watson in the draft
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
"For example, if the Raptors were measuring college basketball prospects, Watson could quickly crunch the numbers and display a comparison of their stats on shooting, assists, and rebounds."
One most assuredly does not need Watson to do this.
Moreover,
"Compare that to drafts of past years, in which the Raptors would use whiteboards with player stats printed on magnets, and call up statisticians each time they wanted new information"
Does not seem it could be remotely true, given...
"Even before Watson came along, the Raptors were tech-savvy. They have access to one of the NBA’s leading analytics teams, and have developed a wide range of tools, including a way to use data from the SportVU camera tracking system to model the best moves a player could make."
Watson is more of IBM's tool for creating the impression that IBM is a technology company and not just a systems integration shop than it is a serious deep learning project. Eventually it will become another tragic chapter among many in the decline of technology at IBM.
I predict sometime in the near future, when Apple and Google and Microsoft and others build some real businesses on deep learning systems that there will be a mournful article published about how sad and left behind Watson has become.
*It's just Alexa with a male voice and some tweaks from IBM.
My day job is essentially practical applications of simulation and machine learning so this was a natural way to broaden my modelling capabilities.
I'd love to chat with anyone who has any specific insight as to what the raptors are doing. If you're in Toronto I'll buy lunch!! Contact info in my profile.
Specifically a focus on methods applicable to selecting teams for Fantasy Hockey and Football with applications to weekly/daily fantasy is mostly what I'm concerned with.
I've spent alot of time/money figuring out what doesn't work very well so I can offer 3 years of failed experiments as a trade:)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2340324/Fo...
As others have mentioned, "Watson" is a brandname/pillar at IBM, similar to Infosphere (anything information management), Websphere (anything middleware-y), etc. It's a bunch of simple and complex, in-house-built and bought products, some of which play together well some of which don't, some of which were pretty impressive and some of which aren't.
To play with Watson Tradeoff Analytics, you can check out the documentation or get a free account with Bluemix [2]. They used to have a subset-of-functionality demo for Raptors on Bluemix as well. It seemed nifty but not groud-breaking.
My understanding is that for the real-thing, they also used the Watson Tone/Sentiment analyzers to see if players would be culturally a good fit, i.e. get along with their team-mates, not just whether they're good on paper.
[disclosure: I work for IBM... nowhere NEAR Watson, in the plain-ol'-ERP department, but I've been curious myself to figure out what the hoopla is or isn't all about]
[1] http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...
[2] https://console.ng.bluemix.net/catalog/services/tradeoff-ana...
This seems reeeeally unlikely, considering both the inaccuracy of Watson sentiment analysis, and that one would need to collect a rather substantial personal writing sample from each candidate.
Personally I think the juice is so high that I won't bother with anything sports betting related other than having a fun exercise/data to play with. Daily sports is way too scummy an industry (used to be a semi-pro online poker player so been there, done that) and the juice is very high as well but I suppose there could be some temporary money in it as there's enough amateurs around. If you want to do that from an ethical POV is another question (one of the reasons I quit poker) but either way the field will get more competitive rather quickly and/or regulated/legislated away.
tl;dr: Don't invest too much time in sports betting other than as a fun hobby with a nice dataset.
Let's stop helping IBM by publishing their press-releases
Watson means nothing. They have some APIs and that's it
Others players have a better product.
I'm not one to help IBM advertise for free
1) everyone at IBM has been told to pretend they are this huge, leading "cloud" company
2) 1) is a clear falsehood
And so you see marketing struggle to come up with all these ridiculous "case studies", because it's difficult if you have to invent them out of thin air instead of real customers.
What IBM is, realistically, is a ridiculously large (and I actually mean ridiculous in the sense of 'how are they not under more anti-trust investigations because they seriously own roughly everything") company with an unbelievably large number of very vert wealthy clients who are scared beyond reason of losing their market share if they don't start using <Insert "new" technology here> so internally everything that happens and looks like a publicity stunt is usually met with a response of "Well no shit we could do that. Why the hell didn't our marketing team point out that we had that capability in the 90's when it would have been impressive"
A lot of the Watson hype seems to actually be because a lot of the companies who traditionally would say 'hm, I dunno about this whole analytics thing. Shouldnt we just stick to spreadsheets and man hours' now have a named thing they can buy that really just covers up that they are actually just investing in a platform with some hadoop clustering and some racks full of P8s (obviously theres a little more to it than that).
The fact that watson can do seemingly cool stuff is actually just a nice way of saying 'anyone can do cool stuff if they invest a bit of cash in technologies that have been around for ages but large companies now have a small window where they can start investing in these technologies and they even get to act like they are an early adopter, of course sans-risk'
I find it amusing that our sales pitch to a rugby team in australia to sell them analytics tools and services failed about 4 years ago, so we gave it to them for free then said we would tell them who the next 10 players to get injured would be and how they would be injured. After the predictions were exactly correct at about injury 6 they were suddenly very interested in buying the stuff. Interestingly, if we sold the same thing now it wouldn't be an analytics platform, we would probably use watson (read: not rebuild that thing, just use the existing stuff because its easier) and it would be marketed as a "watson solution".
It's a great brand, it has potential. The problem is that a) it's being overhyped and b) yet again IBM doesn't understand that if you want it to be used for truly mind-blowing stuff, you have to make it easy for developers to use (or maybe they do, but suck at making it easy to use, see [1]). Then it generates its own, real hype.
For an example of this, I'd say MQ vs MQTT/RabbitMQ, DB2 vs Postgres et al., NoSQL, analytics, Bluemix vs Amazon/GCE/Heroku, Softlayer vs Amazon/Google/Azure. I get that selling to traditional, conservative, and very rich/big firms is a viable strategy - but one that's failing for e.g. Bluemix, Softlayer.
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[1] The Google search results for "Watson API" suck. The documentation sounds like it was written for managers (" Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API) "). Stop getting me to use Bluemix, Amazon/GCE/Heroku work better. Just look at this mess: https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc...
However it does not reflect how a player defends, how he fits into a particular style/role, how much support his teammates get from him other than assists, etc.
It'll be interesting to see if they use deeper analysis to figure out which player is actually better.
Let's say we have two teams, the Ayyys and the Bees; each has two defenders, Schlub and Superman play for the Ayys, and Scrub and Slacker play for the Bees. Let's assume that they all suck equally, except for Superman, who is great.
Now we run your statistic: we compare how the Ayyys do with Schlub on/off against how Scrub does on/off.
The problem is, when Schlub is off, Superman is playing, whereas when Scrub is off, Slacker is playing. This means the Ayyys do quite well when Schlub is off, but the Bees do about as well when Scrub is on compared to when Scrub is off. By this comparison, Schlub is a much worse player than Scrub, even though in actual fact they might be equivalent.
An important part of a statistical model is to also be simple and cheap enough to implement to gain actual statistics, the chance that there is some magical player that doesn't score high on stats but somehow has a meaningful impact on the game that isn't somehow scored is very very slim and in Basketball specifically probably non-existent since it's only a 5vs5 sport which means that every player handles the ball.
Basketball is a small court, 5 people on each team, defense is very important but this hardly is football/rugby or even soccer level of defense everyone handles the ball quite a bit. Time with ball is also a stat that is counted, and often other stats are normalized to it.
The tricky thing with the draft is finding players that have a high ceiling and can perform far in excess of what they were able to do in college. Sabermetrics can help you identify that some of the time but I think attitude, ability to improve specific skills, and innate physical attributes are things a team would have to evaluate in person to uncover undervalued talent.
One of the major fallacies surrounding sports analytics is dismissing information that isn't all-encompassing. Not picking on you, but "those stats are no good because they don't capture X!" is a common refrain.
Some data is better than no data.
I've seen a demo where as part of the app, they scrape player's interviews, twitter feeds, etc to get a personality representation.
I like Watson and it's not their fault for getting publicity...but as for the reporter, c'mon, there's no way you could write that above paragraph without being ignorant of computers pre-Macintosh (or iPod) days. Perhaps the Raptors are old-fashioned but computers have been used for exponentially reducing laborious and time-consuming activities since the dawn of the airlines for solving scheduling problems. And that was much later than the era of computing used for early censuses and cryptoanalysis during the World Wars. But if you've grown up in the "there's an app for that!" age, I guess it's easy to forget how infinite the use cases for computers.
So IBM does end up making HAL...