WADA LOOKS TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO CATCH DOPERS

With sports around the world shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, the World Anti-Doping Agency is looking to artificial intelligence as a new way to detect athletes who cheat.

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WADA is funding four projects in Canada and Germany, looking at whether AI could spot signs of drug use which might elude even experienced human investigators. It’s also grappling with the ethical issues around the technology.

Athletes won’t be suspended solely on the word of a machine. Instead, AI is a tool to flag up suspect athletes and make sure they get tested.

“When you are working for an anti-doping organization and you want to target some athletes, you look at their competition calendar and you look at their whereabouts, you look at the previous results and so forth,” WADA senior executive director Olivier Rabin told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “But there is (only) so much a brain can process in terms of information.”