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Sports Highlights via AI
nazarijo writes "Found via Brian Chin's Weblog, it looks like scientists and researchers at Microsoft are working on ways to automatically discover game highlights. This article in the New Scientist discusses several research groups, some in Europe, working to make these ideas a reality. Microsoft research is doing this, too, with highlights from the Mariner's shown as examples. A choice quote from the end of the MSR piece: 'By hitting the highlights of baseball games, we get to view only the best parts of multimedia life. And who knows what's next? Maybe political speeches will become shorter, or the eleven o'clock news will last only 5 minutes, the witty banter between news anchors edited out.'"
Apple had this "summarize" feature that was going to be incorporated into Sherlock that could take a document and "summarize" it in a few paragraphs. I remember it being uncannily good at picking out what the most important sentences from a document were. Like I remember in one demo they fed it the text of "hamlet" and it spit out about four lines of dialogue from various points in the play that actually did a pretty good job of highlighting what happens over the course of the play...
Unfortunately this feature was never given a proper interface and eventually kind of disappeared into the midst of time. What happened there?
I saw this in Front Page Sports Football '95. The game would pick out 5 plays from each game and save them as highlights. This even worked for the games you simulated between computer-controlled teams. It was pretty predictable stuff, long passes and 1-yard runs for TDs. The computer had a real predilection for fumbles, though, which irked me. Once in a while you'd get an actual interesting one, like a trick play that worked, or career-ending injury. Heh. Career-ending injuries. Too bad that franchise went downhill fast after '95...a few years later they were refunding people's money because the company publically admitted they'd shipped a crappy product.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Media people have personal biases, which they let show through in their work. It's a fact. An automated system would curtail this.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The highlight reel is nice when you have no time and want "just the facts, ma'am", but at what point do you cross over into Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 territory? As a society, are we sure we want just soundbytes, especially when those soundbytes can be presented out of context. No, i didn't RTFA, just speculating here. On saturday night, no less.
I bootleg Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
They don't just do this in Arizona, it happens on ESPN (or maybe it was FOX) all the time (or did a few years ago).
But, this really misses the point of a good baseball game, and people who don't like baseball will never understand that the slowness of the game is a plus, there is a lot of stategy in baseball, and it gives you time to puzzle it all out.
There is also a wonderful antisipation that comes along with baseball. It is the only sport I follow. I used to watch the pitch-only games when I'd miss the full game on TV or could not attend in person.
Again, if you don't like baseball, you won't understand this, and that's fine.