Paris-2024 “faster, higher, stronger” also thanks to AI

“Faster, higher, stronger”also in technology? From the Artificial Intelligence (AI) to next-generation telecommunications networks, the companies participating in the Olympic Games of Paris They aim to apply the Olympic motto to promote their innovations to a global audience.

In addition to the benefits at the corporate image level of being associated with one of the most followed events on the planet, technological giants such as Alibaba, Atos, Intel, Cisco, Samsung, will present at Paris-2024 “innovative concepts” destinated to “changing the face of sport” assured the International Olympic Committee (IOC) about its powerful partners.

First Olympic deployment of AI

The IOC launched its “AI Olympic Agenda” to define the impact that this could have on sport. In practice, Paris-2024 will be the first Olympic event with ample examples of the application of this technology.

An innovation that will allow for the generation of customized and personalized video summaries of events almost in real time, “creating efficiencies in production and editing” for Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), the audiovisual subsidiary of the IOC.

Led by the American giant Intel, this innovation will allow the automatic editing of key moments in 14 disciplines, according to the preferences of the audiovisual rights holders and the target audience on their digital platforms and social networks.

“Each fan, on different platforms, can be offered the right content,” promises the American company.

For this new service, the models have been trained sport by sport with content taken from the vast video archives managed by OBS, which plans to produce a total of 11,000 hours of content during the Paris Games.

In addition to a chatbot for athletes “Designed to provide quick and easy answers to frequently asked questions,” The IOC will also have an AI-based system to monitor thousands of social media accounts in real time, in more than 35 languages, in order to protect the 15,000 athletes and 2,000 officials from online abuse.

“Any identified threats will be reported so that abusive messages can be dealt with effectively by social media platforms, in many cases before the athlete has even seen them,” This publication, the Committee points out, estimates that it will be shared “500 million” of messages on social networks during the 2024 Games.

AI-powered cybersecurity

As for cybersecurity services, Eviden, the specialised branch of the French IT group Atos, is in charge with the technological support of the American company Cisco, while the organisers expect the Games to be subject to a large number of cyberattacks (eight to ten times more than the Tokyo Games, held in 2021 due to the pandemic).

An example of the tool made available to teams by Cisco is XDR, which makes threat levels visible in real time, alerting about IP addresses with anomalous behavior, for example, and eliminates irrelevant threats using artificial intelligence.

“When you’re talking about dealing with 4 billion potential incidents or cybersecurity events, you can’t do it without AI,” Eric Greffier, director of technology for the Olympics at Cisco, told AFP.

“We need to clean up these events to only keep the topics we are not sure about (…) saying that we are going to keep human power for the topics that AI cannot handle automatically”he added. “That is what allows us to be effective.”

Private 5G and 8K

Beyond AI, Paris 2024 will be an Olympics 100% 5G, with telecommunications networks “Faster” and the introduction of private 5G (a mobile network adapted to a specific geographical area through the use of a frequency).

This is a welcome technological innovation to ensure the reliability (very high bandwidth, secure communications, etc.) of the coverage of the opening ceremony on the Seine, the largest production in the world. “never done” in the history of the Games in terms of equipment (with more than 100 camera systems, eight drones, three helicopters and 200 smartphones deployed on the 85 boats that will carry the athletes’ delegations on a 6km parade).

AI will also be present to support the broadcast of live content in 8K, enabled by Intel processors to expand the limits of the ultra-high definition image standard.

“There has been tremendous progress in our ability to deploy networks intelligently and much more quickly (…) we are more automated, we have more intelligence in the system compared to Tokyo”warns Cisco’s Eric Greffier. AI is gaining ground and gaming is no exception.