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.'"

Comments

A really long time ago

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:potential of abuse

[airConditionedGypsy]

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.