About 20 minutes before the start of the women’s final at the U.S. Open last weekend, Paul Hawkins ate a quick meal among the computers in the upper broadcast level of Arthur Ashe Stadium, the glass-encased room that might as well be a mile from the court, and prepared for another night’s work.

Despite his distance from the action, Hawkins had a better view of the lines than anyone in tennis. The 32-year-old with a Ph.D.in artificial intelligence from Durham University in England is the creator of Hawk-Eye, the instant replay technology whose Grand Slam debut went off without a hitch. Before Hawkins and his team left Flushing, they scoped out the Grandstand, in case the United States Tennis Association decides to equip that court with instant replay cameras for next year’s Open. He also spoke with Australian tennis officials, who told him that it’s “99.9%” certain that the Australian Open will adopt instant replay in January. Wimbledon is a good bet to join the parade, and Hawkins has his eyes on Major League Baseball, too.

Hawkins’s affiliation with tennis began four years ago, but cricket was his first love. As a graduate student, he envisioned a system that would remove subjectivity from one of the sport’s contentious calls, leg before wicket.

“Having the idea is the easy bit, making it happen is the hard part,” Hawkins said.

In cricket, a bowler can dismiss a batsman if his toss hits the wicket behind the batsman. If a ball hits a batsman’s leg or person, the batsman could be finished, too, provided the ball would have hit the wicket had the batsman not blocked its path. Hawkins’s cameras and software can calculate the trajectory and speed of the ball at impact, and predict whether it would have hit the wicket had it not been obstructed.

Hawkins said it took two years to adapt this technology to the lines of tennis, and he’s improved it in four years of work with television networks. In Arthur Ashe Stadium, Hawkins employed 10 black-and-white cameras, each humming along at 2,000 frames a second. The images feed into computers that instantly calculate the landing spot of a ball and display it in a digitized 3-D “replay” of the ball traveling toward a given line. Hawk-Eye works so quickly that the USTA asked Hawkins to incorporate a 10-second delay to give the crowd, and players, time to turn their heads toward the on-court video screen to see the results of a challenge. During Andy Roddick’s semifinal match, Hawkins knew the outcome of a challenge before a player even decided a challenge was necessary.

Considering the number of shots hit during a point, a set, and a match over the course of a tournament, there are few close calls in tennis. When such moments arise, Hawkins’s technology has proved invaluable. While umpires are correct far more than players, it’s of no small moment that during 12 tournaments this summer (six men’s events, five women’s events, and the U.S. Open) linesmen were wrong on 37.5% of calls challenged by players. It’s a blip in terms of the number of total calls in those tournaments but very important considering one point can be the difference between a loss and a return to deuce.

Hawkins has ambitions beyond calling balls in and out. Over time, he said, Hawk-Eye could help to better understand the sport by collecting the speed, trajectory, and position of players on each shot for every match that it records.

“What I really want to do is get to the point where the quality of every single shot can be measured,” Hawkins said. “We can almost break it down like a chess game. Ultimately the only purpose for stats is to try to get an insight into who’s going to win, or why they won.”

Hawkins is fascinated by the difference between a brilliant shot and one that is less risky, yet adequate enough to win a point.

“That’s not really a story that’s told,” he said. “Every single player has the ability to hit great shots, but each of them has different strategic decisions as to how much they are going to go for at any one time. You could say, ‘Well, you know, Roddick won this match easily, but he played a strategy that wouldn’t be good enough against a top player.'”

If Roddick can reach the U.S. Open final again next year, perhaps Hawkins will have some advice for him.