Overview
Athena is our first industry solution built on Power Beacon's Helios Enterprise Artificial Intelligence & Simulation Platform. Leveraging the Helios Platform, and its revolutionary AI capabilities, Athena will improve the performance and integrity of sports and gaming, in both the emerging world of eSports, the established venue of professional sport leagues, and casino gaming.
Sports Wagering, Fraud Prevention, Performance Training
AI is the next disruptive technology to promise a huge impact on all forms of gaming. We’re applying it to emerging and legacy forms of sport wagering to combat fraud.
For quite some time, we have forecasted that legalized sports betting in the US is to be the “next big thing” in wagering; and the recent Supreme Court ruling has set the necessary wheels in motion to make that happen.
As broad-based sports wagering at the state level emerges, the demand for each affected sport’s fairness and integrity increases. There are two main reasons: The increase in sports wagering creates more pressure and incentives for athletes to be corrupted and to cheat (e.g., play to lose). Furthermore, the government’s legalization, endorsement, and profit share, make it (in effect) a business partner; therefore the integrity of both the contest and the wagering environment is paramount, with zero tolerance for scandal.
Athena is a robust solution providing leagues and sports wagering firms with a new level of confidence and knowledge.
- Athena integrates immense amounts of data, continuously – Athena integrates data / video streams, and a wealth of historical information to monitor the contest and make sense of what is happening.
- Athena detects and helps to prevent fraud - Renders its predictive analysis on the integrity of the contest including actions by players and officials and their interaction with each other on the playing field, whether that be a basketball court or a virtual, software-defined esports battleground.
- Athena provides real intelligence - Athena provides sports bookmakers an added layer of security and intelligence. And for emerging sports (e.g. esports) Athena accelerates the path to mature wagering and odds-making paradigms with its player ranking/assessment capabilities.
Athena Advantage
Athena focuses on improving sports and gaming in the following key areas...
- Improving an Althete's Performance through real-time measurements, simulation analysis, and "AI Coaching"
- Maintaining the Integrity of fair sports competition through advanced context aware Fraud Detection
- Facilitating Intelligent Wagering and Odds-making paradigms through simulation forcasting
Better Performance
Identifying and Improving Player Situational Awareness and Strategies
The margin between good and world-class performance is razor thin. Players / teams continually explore new ways to improve performance. And with Athena, players can get a deeper understanding into which of their strategies, or gaming traits, are working well and which should be revisited. Athena can review a player's performance and illustrate when and where a player should have altered their strategy, or their response, as compared to any number of other players. You can even have Athena help you and your whole team practice by playing against Athena, and have her simulate the play style of an upcoming opposing team.
Prevent Cheating
Athena Builds Player Behavior Profiles, Comparing Predicted Simulated Responses to Live Game Play.
Athena leverages the advanced simulation capabilities of the Helios platform to build advanced behavior profiles for each individual player based on a number of observed games. Then as a game is being played, all the players are simulated in Helios and Athena monitors how their anticipated moves and strategies compare to their actual movements. With Helios' unique ability to provide context (something not possible with deep-learning alone), Athena can determine if the deviation was acceptable, or if it could indicate fraudulent intent.
Predict Outcome
Simulating Player / Team Match-Ups For Oddsmakers
Money has never been more of an influence on sports than it is today. Oddsmakers want tools that help them evaluate players and predict content outcomes. Athena can use its established player and team behavior profiles to run a slew of simulated match-ups between the two teams in order to compute the odds of a predicted outcome. Using the massive scalability and simulation power of Helios, thousands of virtual match-ups can be run and analyzed to provide guidance.
Prevent Altered Outcomes
Looking across the data-verse outside of the match for possible influences or fraud
Fraud concerns (e.g., contest fixing) have never been so heightened. Numerous cheating scandals have been documented and made public, potentially costing the leagues and gambling organizations dearly if the public's confidence is shaken. Athena is capable of not only monitoring the players, but also all of the transactions that happen outside of the sporting event, such as betting patterns, bet amounts / trends, match positioning, etc. All of this data can be feed into Athena for simulation and pattern discovery. Athena can then correlate this data and determine if it requires closer inspection.
Target Markets
eSports
Players are “gladiators” that do battle in an “electronic arena.” A growing stable of amateurs in remote locations connect via the Internet using their own computers. Professionals use tournament-official computers in public arenas, where they are watched by hundreds of thousands live and on TV.
A Unique Market
eSports combines the intensity of Sight, Sound, Motion, and Skill Value Play, with the excitement of wagering.
eSports appeals to a wide global audience including Generation Y, Z, Millenniums from individuals ranging in ages from 18 to 40.
Multiple Stakeholders
There are many different stakeholders that contibute to, and can benefit financially from, eSports.
- Game Publishers
- Oversight Organizations
- League Operators
- Wagering Companies
- Bookmakers
- Sponsors
- Teams
- Players
- Spectators
Explosive Global Growth
eSports continues to grow at a rapid rate, surpassing $1 billion.
- China, South Korea, United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, Poland, and U.S.
- The fastest growing sport for prize money, sponsorship, revenue and fan viewership
- Mainstream sports establishments are now moving to embrace eSports
Athena Provides the Solutions
The following are some of the solutions that Athena can offer the professional esports leagues, from the individual players all the way up to the game developer companies.
- Detect Performance Fraud - were players cheat by playing to lose (match-fixing).
- Detect Cyber Fraud - players in an unsupervised environment can introduce cheat software, artificially enhancing their performance.
- Identify Software Weakness - by running simulations looking for deficencies in game software that players can exploit.
- Data and Metrics - eSports lends itself to data analysis, yet there are no standardized data formats to chronicle tournaments and evaluate/rank players. Athena can collect data on a massive number of players, and leveraging Helios can analyze and compare all of this data at lightning speeds.
- Handicaping - Currently there is no basis (data or tools) to set the odds of an esports event. With Athena, a dataset can be generated based on the teams simulated competitions against each other and provided to Oddsmakers as a service.
- Performance Training - Since Athena knows the players and their behaviors better than anyone, it becomes the perfect coach, helping to identify strategic mistakes, or a illuminate bias / predictability in a player's style that might be exploited by an opposing team.
Professional Traditional Sports
All Professional Sports Can Be Prone To Fraud. Everything ranging from Hockey, to Soccer, to Baseball, to Football and Basketball, all have various opportunities for fraud. Basketball, of all the professional sports, is most known for incidents of fraud.
Below is just a sampling of the various ways fraud can be committed in professional sports:
- By Players – X Point Shaving, Play-to-lose, or Conspiracy Fraud
- By Coaches - Manage-to-lose, Point spread influence
- By Officials - Purposeful miscalls and mistakes, Point spread influence, Game fixing, Conspiracy Fraud
- By Poor Officialing - Unintended Bias, Mistaken calls
And its no wonder with all the money that is at stake. Consider the following:
- Billions of dollars in illegal wagering each year. Grey and black market gambling provides ominous environment for fraud. Organized crime has a footprint in this endeavor.
- Over $2 Billion wagered on NCAA March Madness alone
- Fantasy leagues booming
- States are moving toward legal wagering, with the NBA already onboard
Current Fraud Management
Reactive - Limited - Low / No Tech
Currently when fraud is discovered or suspected, there is a limited number of tools for the leagues to use:
- Rule changes to try to prevent or discourage a type of fraudulent behavior
- Observation and judgement by an official of third party ruling board
- The involvement of Law Enforcement to attempt to remove the criminal element
- Enforce stiffer penalties and fines to try to curtail the behavior
Athena Fraud Prevention and Detection
Proactive - Robust - Hi-Tech
With the right physical equipment installed at the event, Athena can take advantage of Helios' Deep Learning sensory framework to identify the players and convert them into the simulation environment. At that point, the same powerful fraud detection techniques used for esports can now be applied.
Additional historical and real-time data can be provided to the simulation, along with outside data like mentioned before, to spot patterns in events outside the immediate influence of the players and officials.
