Fireside Chat: How IBM Taught Watson to Play Fantasy Football

How do you teach AI to play fantasy football? How do you configure it to deliver insights at scale? And ensure it’s available 24/7 and during peak load times?

These are the challenges Aaron Baughman, an IBM distinguished engineer, navigated to architect Insights by IBM Watson on ESPN Fantasy, a joint effort between IBM and ESPN to help fantasy football players make better decisions.

Join Aaron Baughman and ESPN’s Daniel Dopp for a fireside chat where they will talk about the complexities involved in teaching Watson to understand Fantasy Football and identify relevant data from hundreds of millions of sources, as well as the technical challenges and solutions involved in building an application used by more than 10 million players, including:

● Deep learning: How Baughman and his team taught Watson to understand football and the data points relevant to fantasy football players using muti-media data mining, and natural language processing.
● Debiasing: Detecting unintended bias with fairness metrics and correcting them with AI-based mitigation techniques
● Computing at scale: A look at the overall system architecture IBM used to deploy the application and ensure its stability from cloud object storage, content generator system, content delivery network, python apps, node apps, serverless computing and docker containers.

Insights by IBM Watson on ESPN Fantasy is a partnership between the two organizations designed to improve the fantasy football experience for millions of users. Through this partnership IBM is putting commercial grade AI into the hands of millions of football fans, giving them access to insight from information at a massive scale and helping them to make better decisions throughout the season. The Watson technology in the ESPN fantasy platform is the same technology that businesses, government agencies, and research institutes employ to push the limits of science and business. In both cases, Watson is solving what is essentially a data challenge by processing vast amounts of information quickly, deriving insight and creating robust context to support better decision making.

Agenda:

• 630pm Doors open, mingling, snacks
• 7pm Fireside Chat Kicks off
• 8pm Q&A
• 830pm Mingling and networking
• 9pm Venue Closes

Sign up today for IBM Cloud via https://ibm.biz/Bdz3KY

About the speakers:

Aaron K. Baughman is a Distinguished Engineer and Master Inventor within IBM Interactive Experience focused on AI and Emerging Technology. He has worked with ESPN, all 4 tennis grand slams, The Masters, USGA, Grammys, Tony Awards, Watson Jeopardy! and classified gov't agencies. Aaron holds a BS in CS from Georgia Tech, a MS in CS from Johns Hopkins and certificates from the Disney Institute and Coursera. He holds 149 patents with more than 100 pending.

Daniel Dopp is the co-host of The Fantasy Show with Matthew Berry on ESPN+ and producer of The Fantasy Focus Football podcast, ESPN’s longest running and most consumed podcast. Before joining ESPN, Daniel was an intelligence analyst for the NSA during his 6-year active duty tour with the United States Air Force.