What if the Masters could turn data into insight?

To produce the insight and content found in the Masters digital experience, a variety of data from multiple sources is captured by cameras, microphones, lasers and volunteers. This includes data about the course (hole numbers, distances, historical scoring averages), the players (name, world ranking, performance statistics), shots (date, time, distance travelled, landing zones), and more than 20,000 video clips of every shot on every hole.

During the tournament, the team from IBM Consulting works closely with the Masters Digital team in the state-of-the-art Masters Content Center. From here, they co-produce the Masters digital experience, publishing content, managing data feeds, and monitoring cybersecurity activity.

Data from the course flows through a series of public and private clouds, where it is integrated and analyzed. This diagram shows the automated workflow for AI commentary, a new feature in the Masters that generates spoken commentary for more than 20,000 video clips. Each application used in the production of AI commentary (shown in the red boxes) has unique requirements. The team built them as containerized apps using Red Hat OpenShift, so they can run on any cloud, anywhere.

To add AI-powered, spoken commentary to more than 20,000 video clips produced at the Masters, the team started with a large language model (LLM), which had been trained on a massive corpus of language data. They then began adding “domain expertise” to the model by training it on the specific language of golf and the Masters. During the tournament, every video clip is processed by two neural networks making hundreds of millions of computations. The AI model produces thousands of possible sentences to describe each shot, and then selects the best based on quality and variety.

This 24-hour rolling incident analysis is representative of the volume and variety of security events the Masters experiences over the course of one day. Most of the events are not serious, so the IBM Security team uses QRadar to separate the signal from the noise, identify the most serious threats and suggest the best course of action.

The award-winning Masters app combines innovation and data-driven insight with beautiful design and user experience. IBM iX and the Masters Digital team co-create the experience using the IBM Garage and IBM Design Thinking to understand the user journey, enhance the design, and develop new features. For example, “My Group” allows digital patrons to watch every shot from all their favorite players. And “Round in 3 Minutes” uses AI to automatically produce highlight reels for every player, just minutes after they complete their round.