AI Recognizes Athletes’ Emotions – Implications for Sports Betting

Using computer-assisted neural networks, Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Duisburg-Essen have been able to accurately identify affective states from the body language of tennis players during games. For the first time, they trained a model based on artificial intelligence (AI) with data from actual games. Their study, published in the journal Knowledge-Based Systems, demonstrates that AI can assess body language and emotions with accuracy similar to that of humans. However, it also points to ethical concerns.

For their study, “Recognizing affective states from the expressive behavior of tennis players using convolutional neural networks,” sports sciences, software development and computer science researchers from KIT and the University of Duisburg-Essen developed a special AI model. They used pattern-recognition programs to analyze video of tennis players recorded during actual games.

Can this have implications for “in-play” sports betting? Can an AI program determine if a player is going to battle back from a deficit to to win a match? We are on a slippery slope.