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How the Human Element Balances AI and Contributor Efforts for Optimal Outcomes
We are committed to delivering dependable solutions to power artificial intelligence applications, and our Crowd plays a crucial role in accomplishing this objective. With a global community of over one million contributors, our diverse Crowd provides invaluable feedback on our clients’ AI models. Their collective expertise enhances operational efficiency and customer satisfaction, making them indispensable to our business success. Given ...
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Appen’s Benchmarking Solution: Confidently Choosing the Right LLM for Your Application
With Large Language Model innovation happening at a rapid pace, LLMs are presenting both opportunities and challenges for practitioners. One of the most prominent problems they face is how to strategically select the most suitable model for a specific enterprise application – a decision that holds far-reaching consequences for aspects like user experience, maintenance and profitability. Model selection requires a ...
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Appen’s AI Chat Feedback Solution: Enhancing Conversational AI Performance
The rise of Large Language Models has paved the way for advanced conversational agents, powering various applications such as chatbots and virtual assistants. Often, the need for multi-turn evaluation is overlooked however, it is important to test a LLMs contextual understanding and coherence in complex conversations that extend over multiple turns or dialogues, mirroring real-world applications. This will help identify ...
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The White House’s Artificial Intelligence voluntary safety commitments missed the most essential component in the safeguarding of AI: human oversight.
I am an AI optimist, but I am not naive. I, like many others, have been heartened by the dedication to proactive regulation among AI leaders, which is why last week I was encouraged to see the White House’s action on AI risk mitigation, including eight commitments from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. These commitments make for ...
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How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Everyday Lives for the Better
How did you use artificial intelligence today? If you think you haven’t, think again. AI is already powering so many of our everyday activities, and though you may not be intentionally leveraging it as a tool just yet, that’s likely to change in the very near future. The AI race is just getting started, as top tech companies build and ...
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Unraveling the Link Between Translations and Gender Bias in LLMs
Inclusiveness and harmlessness are two conditions integral to AI applications’ success and adoption. That, we cannot deny. But, inclusiveness and harmlessness are cultural aspects of our language and human relations. Not considering these specificities leads, at best, to quirky outputs but at worst, to biased and toxic situations. Here’s an example I recently explored comparing AI applications Chat GPT 3.5 ...
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Natural Language Processing – Connecting The World through Language With AI
As young children, before we can even walk or talk, we’re listening. We’re hearing the sounds and vocalizations made by other people. We’re attaching those combinations of sounds to meanings, such as ‘mother’ and ‘door’, and learning to read the facial expressions of those around us to deepen our understanding of blocks of words. Then we go to school, start ...
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Enhancing AI Efficiency: Streamlining AI Training Data with Workflows
As the world becomes more and more data-driven, companies are finding it increasingly difficult to manage their ever-growing datasets. Data annotation is a crucial process in many industries, including machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. This is especially true for Large Language Models (LLMs), which require massive amounts of labeled text data to learn and improve. As the ...
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Stopping AI Hallucinations in Their Tracks
As large language models (LLMs) with generative AI applications become increasingly sophisticated, there is a growing concern about the potential for these models to produce inaccurate or misleading output. This issue is known as “hallucination,” where AI models produce completely fabricated information that’s not accurate or true. Hallucinations can have serious implications for a wide range of applications, including customer ...
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The 5 Steps of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback
How RLHF Works Reinforcement learning is revolutionizing the way we approach complex problems in the world of technology and business. It’s a powerful tool that enables machines to learn from their environment and make informed decisions based on rewards and punishments. But what if we could combine the power of reinforcement learning with the human touch? That’s where the ...
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Exploring the Intersection of Computer Vision and Transportation
Computer Vision and Transportation Computer vision is like human vision, except it’s through the eyes of AI. In the world of AI, computer vision can quickly process images and identify what it’s staring at, except with higher accuracy, because eyes don’t play tricks on machines. In the world of transportation that translates into allowing cars to be self-driving because they ...
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May the AI Be with You: Enhancing Art Through Technology
The Star Wars franchise has been captivating and inspiring fans for more than four decades with its rich universe, compelling characters, and thrilling stories. There are many ways the Star Wars fandom express their love for the franchise—fan art, cosplay, writing and more—which can now be enhanced using AI technology. Fan Art and AI Fan art is practically canon ...
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Tech Moves, Tech Predictions, and the State of Artificial Intelligence
As a leading provider of high-quality training data for machine learning and artificial intelligence, we’ve been making headlines lately due to our role in advancing the development of cutting-edge technologies. With Q1 2023 closed, we’re giving you the PR wrap-up, highlighting some of the company’s major achievements and milestones over the past few months. Let’s take a closer look at ...
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Appen’s Environmental Impact Commitment to a Better Future
As we commemorate Earth Day in the midst of great advances in AI technology, we are constantly reminded of the environmental challenges that we are facing through news, social media and our day to day interactions with the environment. The latest IPCC report highlighted that our greenhouse gas emissions have increased over the last 5 years and more urgent ...
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Smart Solutions for a Greener Future: How AI is Making a Difference
Artificial intelligence has become a hot topic this year. Thanks to the rapid adoption of generative AI applications, headlines are full of predictions on how AI could revolutionize our policies, jobs, and the economy. Did you know it’s also pioneering the way we approach sustainability challenges? By analyzing massive amounts of data and providing insights and tools that can inform ...
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Risk Assessment in the Digital Age: How AI is Transforming Loan Analysis
Every item has a price, but can you afford it? Taking out loans are great for life’s big expenses, like buying a house, car, or paying for school. Paying the loan back can be tricky. Total household debt rose by $351 billion, or 2.2 percent, to reach $16.51 trillion in the third quarter of 2022, according to the latest Quarterly Report ...
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Red Teaming: Why It’s Critical for Accurate and Reliable Generative AI
Are you curious about the powerful world of Generative AI, but apprehensive about potential vulnerabilities that can come with it? Look no further than red teaming, also referred to as Jailbreaking or prompt injection. This critical aspect of AI development is often overlooked, but they play a crucial role in improving the performance of Generative AI models. The potential of ...
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Maximizing AI Performance through Effective Data Annotation Instructions
By: Geoff LaPorte, Professional Services Engineer For Technologists working with AI, data quality is of the utmost importance. The accuracy and reliability of AI models are dependent on the data that’s used to train them. To ensure the best possible data, technologists rely on large crowds of contributors to help with data collection and annotation tasks. Crowd contributors not only ...
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Unlocking the Power of Human Feedback: Benefits of RLHF
Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) is a cutting-edge technique that has been gaining popularity in recent years as a means of improving the performance of large language models. It’s a powerful way to train these models using human feedback, and the human input component has many similarities to search evaluation. Both approaches are designed to improve the quality and ...
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A Letter From Newly Appointed Appen CTO Saty Bahadur
Dear Employees, Clients, Shareholders, and Stakeholders, I am honored to join Appen as the Chief Technology Officer and excited to introduce myself to all of you. For years, I have been following Appen as one of the leading companies in the AI space. After working with some of the best companies in the industry, it’s a privilege to have the ...
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Breaking Down Barriers for Women in Tech
Each year, for International Women’s Day, we celebrate the achievements of women around the world and recognize the progress made towards gender equity. The fight for gender equity, however, is not yet over. We must continue to imagine a world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination – a world that’s diverse, equitable, and inclusive. One of the key themes of ...
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Launching New Generative AI? Four Principles Critical to Success
Generative AI is poised to radically open a world of new opportunities to delight customers across every industry. From conversational chatbots that deliver personalized responses, to code for various applications, to targeted content for marketing communications, generative AI is revolutionizing the way business is done. In the race to deliver exceptional customer experiences, companies need to build trusted generative AI ...
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Beyond “Do No Harm:” Why AI Must be Ethical and Responsible
The pace of technological change is increasing. The long-term uptake of AI will depend not only on societies’ willingness to embrace new technology, but also on the willingness of those developing the technology to embrace all of society. Generative AI is the latest breakthrough in AI, and like many cutting-edge technologies generative AI is facing its own teething challenges. Society ...
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Unlocking Insights with Document Intelligence
The world is full of documents that are as varied as the processes and organizations that generate them. Even in today’s digital-first era, many transactions still depend on paper documents such as invoices, contracts, legal documents, employee records, financial statements, and more. Scanning hard-copy documents is a common practice for organizations looking to digitize their paper records, make them searchable ...
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The Future of AI: Insights from a Generative AI Experiment
One of the hottest topics everyone’s talking about is generative AI. Depending on who you ask, some will say it’s the answer to all their copy and imagery needs. Others are skeptical and believe it’s just a fad that will pass within a few months’ time. As experts in AI data and advocates for advances in AI that improve how ...
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Key Metrics to Monitor Data Quality
The key to successful implementation of an AI powered program or device is dependent on the data used to train the model. Using poor quality training data results in a poorly trained model that can require additional time and budget to retrain and test. The best way to prevent this is to implement quality checks in the model training process. ...
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Generating Emotions for You: A Generative AI Experiment
Can a robot feel love? It’s a great question and the puzzle of sentience is one that scientists have marveled over for years. Though we’re not ready to assign feelings to our smart machines, they’re ready to help us express our feelings with the help of generative AI. Natural Emotion Expression AI is something consumers are getting comfortable with as ...
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The Future of Automotive is Fueled by AI
We spend a lot of time in cars—at times more than expected when traffic, weather, and other road conditions are factored in. That’s why it’s so important that our experience on the road is both comfortable and safe. Transportation accidents happen every day, making it particularly beneficial for all when extra safety measures are implemented into vehicles. With the evolution ...
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Meet the Expert: Ankit Harneja
Every action we take can influence how we live our lives, for Ankit Harneja, reading the book Zero to One by Peter Thiel was the action that led him to a career focused on automotive innovation. Early Life From an early age, Ankit had always been interested in technology. Though he was at a different school every year, the one ...
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Harnessing the Power of AI Training Data for Success in the Retail and Ecommerce Industry
In today’s digital age, customers have high expectations when it comes to their shopping experiences. Whether shopping online or in a brick-and-mortar store, they want to be able to find the products they’re looking for quickly and easily. Catalogs, both physical and digital, are essential when it comes to shopping from any retail business. With the rise in e-commerce from ...
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Why I Joined Appen as CEO
Dear Friends: Today, I start as the new CEO and President of Appen. I’m excited to join this amazing company and enable our team members and customers to build a trusted and innovative AI applications that deliver new and exciting experiences. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are giving rise to AI powered solutions that can see, hear, learn, and reason, ...
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Appen’s 2023 AI Data Predictions
We live in a society that’s ever changing, always wanting more, always wanting to see what the next big thing will be. To kick off 2023, we tapped some of our executives and thought leaders to share their predictions of what the year has in store for the future of AI and Data. Sujatha Sagiraju, Erik Vogt, and Jen Cole ...
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Data: The Greatest Challenge and Biggest Reward
Ready to Begin Your AI Journey? 3 Steps Financial Advisors Can Take Now Wealth management is benefitting from recent advances in AI. Alerts can now be generated for when financial status’ change. In this Barron’s article, Jen Cole shares how deep learning is ideal for complex data analysis. Jen state’s that “Robo-advisors are good examples of deep learning at work. ...
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Ethical Data – Why Your AI Models Need It
An Intro to Ethics The terms, “ethical data” and “responsible data” can be ambiguous in meaning. In the world of tech and AI data, ethics refers to responsible gathering and use of data to train models as well as ensuring that those models interact with humans without bias. It’s not only important to gather and use the data responsibly for ...
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Is it Magic, or is it Data?
All around the world, kids and adults alike are writing letters on the topic of what gifts they want for the holiday season. Some of these letters are given to friends or family, others are mailed to the person they know as Santa Claus. The exact number of languages that Santa can speak is unknown, but speculation says it could ...
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Retail Restocking with Robots
“Let me check the back,” are words often heard over the past few years, as the item a person has come to purchase appears out of stock. With the rise of labor shortages over the past few years, shelves aren’t always fully stocked like many are used to. One way to alleviate the burden of constantly restocking and allow employees ...
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Meet the Exec: Brian Haskett
From Draftsman to Management People say it’s good to start your career young and that’s exactly what Brian did. At the age of 12, he taught himself how to program computers at a time when the personal computer market was booming. By the age of 16, Brian was working as a draftsman at a local land surveying company—a job that ...
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Unwrapping the Intelligence Behind Smart Gifts
Unless you’re in the tech industry, you’re likely not thinking “data” when you’re making your list, but luckily, we are. AI powers some of the most coveted products this season and that intelligence is fuelled by training data. A lot of electronic devices, or devices with the word ‘’smart’ in the name, were created using data to train the algorithms ...
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The Great AI Adoption Race
When it comes to technology, there’s undoubtedly an ongoing race to be the first with the best, most innovative advancements, and AI is no exception. With a global shift to employees working from home during the pandemic, there was a need to expedite AI-powered projects to ease the transition and establish a new sense of normal in a remote world. ...
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AI Brings People Together
With the holidays upon us, people are gathering from near and far to spend time together and enjoy each other’s company. For some, however it’s not that easy to connect in person making virtual tools powered by AI a simple solution. Thanks to advances in computer vision, search relevance, and automotive technology, there’s plenty of ways people can connect both ...
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Meet the Executive: Sarah Lowe
Life of Sarah While some of us just learn about history through books and TV shows, others live it. Born in Nigeria, Sarah and her mother fled the country during the Biafran war. Because men were not allowed to leave during the war, it would be more than a year before the family was reunited in the UK, where they ...
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Women in AI, Synthetic Data, Bias Reduction, and More!
There’s no shortage of news about companies making innovative moves in AI and Appen is no exception. Q3 headlines in key media publications highlight women in AI, expert tips on managing data and reducing bias, a breakthrough in synthetic data and more! Read on to see what news outlets had to say about Appen last quarter. How ‘Fake’ Data Can ...
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Evaluation, Not Practice, Makes Perfect
Products and programs get launched with bugs all the time–mobile updates to your favorite apps are a perfect example of a deploy and optimize approach. Often there are minor glitches that have little affect on the product or user experience, but sometimes there’s a bug that’s so apparent it takes the world by storm. People wonder how mistakes like these ...
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Pedestrian Recognition — Key to Road Safety
Share the road–not just with other drivers, but with bicyclists, and pedestrians whenever you make turns that have you go over crosswalks or bike lanes. There are plenty of distractions for a driver to contend with on a busy street or even on a quiet neighborhood road. With the development of new AI technologies, cars get an extra set of ...
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How Scary is AI?
It’s high tide for spooky season. People everywhere are watching horror films and going to haunted houses just to scare themselves for entertainment. Controlled creeps can be fun, but things that are out of our control can be genuinely scary. The uncertainty of the future, for example, can be nightmare-inducing for some. For others, something like AI will make their ...
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Meet the Executive: Erik Vogt
Life of Erik – One with Nature Outdoor adventurer on the weekend, AI technology guru during the week–that’s Erik Vogt. Surrounded by woods and beaches in the Chesapeake Bay, a love for the open air and nature has influenced him throughout his life. His childhood claim to fame is the epic sand sculptures he built during the summer months. As ...
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Monitoring Driver Awareness with AI
“Soon” is the word often echoed when people ask when self-driving cars will be the norm. It’s only natural that there would be some anticipation; self-driving cars allow us to talk, text, or even read a book while “driving,” or order an extra drink at dinner and know, confidently, that you have a safe ride home. While self-driving cars are ...
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Food + AI = The Solution to End World Hunger
Food is something we sometimes take for granted. For many, there is no worry about when we’ll have our next meal. Quite a few people, however, don’t have the same luxury. Around 10% of the world’s population, or 811 million people, go hungry every day. World Food Day is a holiday created by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) branch ...
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Ethics at Every Stage of the AI Lifecycle: Sourcing
Bias it’s everywhere, you can’t avoid it and it isn’t always a bad thing. You can liken data bias to personal preference. Say you and your friend are getting ice cream and you love chocolate, your preference, or in this case your bias, is that chocolate ice cream is superior, so you order that. Yet your friend doesn’t like chocolate ...
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The Power of Translation: Connecting the Past, Present, and Future
More than 7,100 languages are spoken in the world, but 97% of the world’s population speaks only 4% of them. While most of the remaining 96% are simply spoken by a small group of people, some of them are extinct or near extinction like Larrakia, whose last native speaker passed away over 20 years ago. If this pattern holds true, ...
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Mastering Data for the AI Lifecycle, Sales Strategy, Leveraging AI for Small Business and more!
There’s no shortage of news about companies making innovative moves in AI, and Appen is no exception. Q2 headlines in key media publications highlight AI for small business, expert tips on managing data for the AI lifecycle, a breakthrough in synthetic data and more! Read on to see what news outlets had to say about Appen last quarter. 16 Tips ...
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A Day in the Life of an Appen Crowd Contributor: Hediye Cengiz
You’ve heard us say that quality training data is at the center of AI. The core of that training data is the crowd contributor. More than one million contributors make the work we do possible and help us to produce the highest quality training data for our customers. Our crowd works hand-in-hand with machine learning assistance to efficiently and accurately ...
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Data Quality: The Better the Data, the Better the Model
If your data’s not accurate, your model won’t run…properly, that is. While you may end up with a working model, it won’t function the way it was intended. The quality of your data is arguably the most important aspect of training a machine learning model. No matter how much data you supply the model with, it won’t make much difference ...
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Argh Matey, Let AI Help You Speak a New Language
“If you were waiting for the opportune moment, that was it” Captain Jack Sparrow. When we think pirates, oftentimes Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow comes to mind. What’s not to love about pirates? They sail the seas looking for buried treasure, drink a lot of rum, and talk in their own pirate language. The best part about being (or ...
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Ethics at Every Stage of the AI Lifecycle: Data Preparation
As AI receives wider market adoption and is implemented as a tool across use cases, more challenges appear. These projects run into concerns that weren’t apparent at infancy of AI–one critical and persisting issue is ethical AI and how to manage bias in data. Data bias is an error that overweighs or underrepresents a certain element in the dataset. When ...
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Meet the Executive: Vasagi Kothandapani
A Career Student of Technology Throughout your working life, you’ll come across all kinds of people–if you’re lucky, some will possess qualities you want to emulate, like passion, drive, determination. These are the qualities of someone who knows exactly what they want, and Vasagi Kothandapani (Vas) is one of them. Appen’s VP of Global Accounts has built her career on ...
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How AI Supports Philanthropic Companies
Supporting a cause that strives to find a cure for illness, builds technology to make living easier, or provides services to those in need, is a noble mission. Whether offering monetary support or time, donors and volunteers often have a lot of questions about the goals, services, and resource allocation of the causes they choose to align with. AI is ...
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Successful AI Models Start with Data Sourcing
Data, by definition, is comprised of stats and facts that have been collected and used for reference and analysis, yet, it’s so much more than that. It’s the building block for machine learning. It fuels our AI models and without it we wouldn’t have the technology we have today. That’s why data sourcing is a crucial step in managing data ...
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Automated Drive-Thru — Banks, Restaurants, Fast-Foods, Grocery Stores
If you drove through a drive-thru in the 1970’s and again in 2023, the only difference you’d notice is the type of cars in line. Drive-thru technology has been serving us well for over 50 years, but now it’s time to modernize it. With AI and automation, drive-thrus can become a thing of the future. AI has the ability to ...
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Meet the Executive: Mike Frame
Career Background From a young age, Mike was destined to have a career in sales. He started his first business at the age of 10 by creating a lawn mowing company where he lived. On Mike’s first day, he attracted 6 customers, and kept mowing their lawns until he left for college, at which point he passed ownership on to ...
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The 2022 State of AI and Machine Learning Report: What you Need to Know
Our eighth annual edition of The State of AI and Machine Learning Report is here. In this report we continue our evaluation of an industry in constant flux. Our goal is to share the current AI trends and focus of companies, as well as challenges they are experiencing. While the impact of COVID is slowly lessening, it’s still driving an acceleration ...
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Future Ways of Working: How Employee Voices Create Companywide Change
As a AI technology company, we’re constantly adapting to keep up with the latest demands and be on the cutting edge of new innovations in our industry. We would be remiss not to do the same when it comes to how we manage the way we work. With employees returning to office post-pandemic, we observed many in the broader workforce ...
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Revisiting The State of AI and Machine Learning 2021
Looking for the 2022 State of AI and Machine Learning Report? Click here to read it! In preparation to share our 8th annual State of AI Report, we’ve looked back on last year’s report to see how much the industry has progressed in a year and if our assumptions were accurate. Our goal was to provide a current picture of ...
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Training Chatbots to Improve Customer Experience
When it comes to taking care of your customers, one of the most important things is showing them respect as people and respect for their time. That means being prompt and helpful during your interactions—especially if you want them to come back. Society has set the expectation that a customer can ask a question any time, 24/7, and get a ...
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Autonomous Vehicles: One of AI’s Most Challenging Tasks
Autonomous vehicles are said to be the holy grail of the automotive industry, set to revolutionize transportation. The hype for autonomous vehicles just a few years ago was as high as can be—so what happened? Where’s our driverless car revolution that so many companies touted we’d have by 2021? As it turns out, creating a self-driving car is much harder ...
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Meet the Executive: Andrea Clayton
For the past few years, companies have been shifting their rhetoric from what they’re making and selling to what they’re doing to benefit their community and their employees. But, many were just paying lip service to the cause. Not at Appen. We put our actions where our mouth is, starting with the hiring of Chief People Officer Andrea Clayton in ...
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A Healthy Planet is a Happy Planet: How AI can Help Heal the Environment
The earth, the environment, nature is entirely organic and has sustained itself since its formation. Seemingly something so organic has no need for technology, yet, with all the changes going on in this planet, we can look to AI to help put this planet back on track for happy and healthy millennia to come. A worldwide goal has been set ...
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AI Ethics: How Fair Pay Benefits Our Crowd Contributors
We’re in the data business. Crucial components in the AI lifecycle are data sourcing and data preparation–collecting, cleaning, and labeling data. We create datasets for companies all over the world and we couldn’t do it without the support of our global Crowd. Our contributors are the people who collect and label data, making AI and machine-learning solutions possible. That’s why ...
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Perfecting AI Customer Service in the Hospitality Industry with Data
Hospitality is a very human-centric field. Whether it’s a hotel, restaurant, or place of entertainment, a person will be there accompanying you every step of the way—that’s what we’ve come to expect in customer service. But, just because we’ve become accustomed to it, does that mean it’s the best possible experience? Artificial Intelligence has been taking the hospitality industry to ...
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Meet the Executive: Wilson Pang
Meet: Wilson Pang, Appen Chief Technology Officer When Wilson Pang graduated from Zhejiang University in China, where he grew up, with Bachelor’s and Master degrees in electrical engineering, his career plans didn’t include working in artificial intelligence. Mostly, that’s because artificial intelligence was still the stuff of science fiction. From his early days, Wilson fell in love with technology. In ...
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AI Can Help End World Hunger, One Crop at a Time
World hunger is on top of everyone’s mind–especially with tomorrow being World Hunger Day. The thought of everyone having enough to eat is a comforting one; One that can soon become a reality. As with the introduction of most new things, there’s some hesitation about how much of a role AI should play in something so delicate as having control ...
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Meditation & AI: Creating a Customized Relaxation Experience
It seems these days you can’t scroll a website or a social network without being touched by at least one mental health message. It’s not just you. It’s something everyone can benefit from and given the added stresses of this current constant state of change, companies are tapping into that need with smart technology that can add a little bit ...
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AI is the Key to Convenience
Anyone and everyone can benefit from new technology and who doesn’t love the idea of more convenience, more simplicity and more free time? Add a few extra free minutes to your day or enrich your hobbies with AI powered tools that add a little convenience to your everyday hobbies. From e-book readers to AI powered appliances to plant identifying applications ...
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May the 4th Be with You: The AI Behind Movie Magic
Whether you adore the Cantina Band or prefer to jam out to The Imperial March, we’d like to say… May the 4th be with you. May the 4th (Star Wars Day), is an informal holiday that honors the Star Wars legacy and its undeniable impact on modern filmmaking. Star Wars is credited with a host of innovations in cinema including ...
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Appen in the News: Q1 2022
At Appen, we have a diverse team working on a ton of different, interesting projects. Many of these projects are niche or technical and get written about in various publications across the internet. We put together the biggest hits from Q1 of 2022 to share with you. Here’s everything we’re working on and what everyone has to say about it. ...
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Synthetic Data and its Role in the World of AI
What is Synthetic Data? Synthetic data is artificially created rather than captured from real life and has evolved from machine learning needs for data. Originally, training data had to be obtained to cover every possible scenario to accurately train AI models. If a scenario had not occurred or been captured, there was no data, leaving a huge gap in the ...
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Earth Day: Appen’s Commitment to a Better Environment
It may seem a strange change for the global leader in Data for the AI Lifecycle to pause from our usual AI insights and Data for the AI Lifecycle content to recognize an organic moment such as Earth Day. After all, does data really have an impact on our planet? The short answer is, yes, it does—but we also have an ...
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How Microwork Opportunities and Stablecoin Use Can Benefit People Around the World
One of the center points of technological innovation today is data. But, to gather and annotate that data takes thousands of hours of work. Work that can be done by anyone, anywhere in the world. The internet makes it possible to break up these tasks into thousands of micro-tasks which can then be distributed to workers around the globe. This ...
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What is MLOps?
The exciting wave of developments in AI and machine learning applications might lead you to believe that organizations are also advancing rapidly in their ability to deliver ML products. The reality is, ML internal processes are having trouble catching up with the overall evolution of the industry… but there’s hope in the form of MLOps! MLOps, which stands for machine ...
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Machine Learning Model Validation – The Data-Centric Approach
When it comes to building a machine learning model, all the excitement and energy gets channeled into collecting the data and training the model. What often gets less time in the spotlight is testing the model and validating the results. The right validation techniques help to estimate unbiased generalized model performance and give a better understanding of how the model ...
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Meet the Executive Series: Sujatha Sagiraju
One of our core values at Appen is recognizing and celebrating the people that make the work we do possible. For us, that means writing about and talking about the accomplishments of our people so you can see just how awesome they are. To celebrate our staff, we’ve started a series highlighting a day in the life of an Appen ...
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Make your Speech Recognition System Sing
Your data can be the difference between an efficient and cost-effective voice recognition system and one that doesn’t work very well. When it comes to machine learning, one of the most important components for a successful launch and return on investment is data. If you’re planning to build a voice recognition system or conversational AI, you’ll need a big speech ...
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Machine Learning in Advertising – Predictive Targeting and Moderation
The job of marketers is to get the right product in front of the right consumer at the moment that they’re most likely to buy that product. The ability for marketers to do just that and to drill down to more and more specific niches of customers has grown exponentially over time. AI technology is now being used to help ...
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A Foundation of Women In Tech
This year, the world will be celebrating International Women’s Day on March 8 honoring the impact of women under the theme of #BreaktheBias. While we all celebrate on March 8, at Appen, we strive to take steps every day to make the workplace and tech space more diverse, equitably, and free of bias. We know that the more diverse people ...
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How Artificial Intelligence Data Reduces Overhead Costs for Organizations
When it comes to AI, many companies think of these as projects, with limited scope and short term. They see the high cost of development and deployment and aren’t sure that AI is right for their company. What they don’t recognize off the bat is the long-term goal of reducing costs that may result from applying AI to the right ...
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How Data and Machine Learning Model Choices Impact Deployment Rates
When you’re building a machine learning model, there are a few critical components to consider: calculation power, the algorithm, and the data. Often, a company will focus most of its resources on developing the right, bias-free algorithm and investing in more calculation power. Data is often an after-thought or forgotten entirely until it’s time to run the model. When data ...
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How Data Annotation Platforms Help Improve Machine Learning Models
In recent years, AI has become less of a flashy new idea and more mainstream with a wide variety of businesses implementing AI technology and machine learning models into their business practices. And, as the world generates ever-growing amounts of data, the data you need for your specific use case is likely already out there just waiting for you to ...
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Introducing the New Era of Data for the AI Lifecycle
Data for the AI Lifecycle encompasses four main steps in the continuous cycle to deliver high quality data needed for any AI project. The steps are: data sourcing, data preparation, model training and deployment, and model evaluation by humans. Data sourcing, data preparation and model evaluation are the most laborious and data intense and if not done well, can lead ...
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Expert, Secure and Timely Transcription Services for Conference Calls
Searching online for dial-in conference call transcription reveals countless ‘cheap and cheerful’ DIY options. But if quality matters as well as cost, you’ll need an experienced, specialist transcription provider. Developments in recording technology and speech to text conversion software mean there are plenty of DIY solutions out there if you want to create a written record of your important conference ...
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Meet the Executive Series: Jen Cole
At Appen, we know that we couldn’t do it without the people who work on and in the company each and every day. As a thank you for their hard work, we’re featuring one of our contributors each month through a series of blog posts and we’re introducing you to our executive team. At Appen, we enable the most innovative ...
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Search Relevance — Why No Website or App Should Be Without It
Set the scene: you’re looking for a new item of clothing, so you navigate to your favorite online store. You hop up to the search bar to type in what you’re looking for. What results do you expect? Highly accurate, relevant, and instantaneous results. Customers expect high-quality results no matter what website they’re searching on, what they’re looking for, and ...
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AI vs. Deep Learning vs. Machine Learning: Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know
If you’ve spent any time reading articles about tech in the last few years, you’ve likely bumped into some new terms such as artificial intelligence or AI, machine learning or ML, and deep learning. These trending tech terms are often used without explanation of what makes them different. And, to be clear, they’re not interchangeable. As technology becomes more and ...
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The Rise in Computer Vision Datasets & How It Benefits Organizations
One of the most exciting subfields in AI and machine learning today is Computer Vision or CV. CV is used in a diverse number of applications to improve our daily lives, as well as advance science and technology research. These use cases include: Autonomous driving Automatic image captioning Facial recognition and tagging on social media Medical imaging analysis and diagnostics ...
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Top 5 Predictions About the Future of AI and Data
For the past few years, overarching goals with AI have been aspirational. As this new technology exists in the realm of literature and academia and is applied to real-world problems and bent to real-world solutions, there has to be a reckoning with its true capabilities and use cases. For AI, 2021 was a year of over-promising. While potentially underwhelming and ...
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What are Managed Services in AI?
Deploying a well-performing AI model is a complicated, resource-intensive task, so it’s no surprise companies are turning to managed services for assistance. Generally speaking, managed services refers to any end-to-end white glove service. A company can partner with a managed service provider (MSP) for all or part of a given operation via managed services. This concept is now frequently being ...
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Apache Log4J Security Update
The Appen team has taken quick action in relation to resolving the vulnerability advisory related to Log4shell (CVE-2021-44228) which may affect organizations that use vulnerable versions of the Log4j package. The vulnerability is a remote code execution issue in the Apache Log4j logging services application which may affect Java applications. During our security team’s review, malicious or suspicious activity has ...
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What is Synthetic Data?
Everything You Need to Know About Synthetic Data Companies launching artificial intelligence (AI) face a major hurdle in collecting sufficient data for their models. For many use cases, the right data simply isn’t available or is very difficult and expensive to acquire. Missing, or incomplete, data isn’t desirable when creating AI models, but even larger tech companies misstep in this ...
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What is Automatic Speech Recognition?
Advances in AI in conjunction with the global pandemic have motivated businesses to enhance their virtual interactions with customers. Increasingly, they’re turning to virtual assistants, chatbots, and other speech technology to power these interactions efficiently. These forms of AI rely on a process known as Automatic Speech Recognition, or ASR. ASR involves the conversion of speech into text; it enables ...
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What is Active Learning?
When and Why You Should Select an Active Learning Approach The key to training any machine learning (ML) model is data. Yet data remains one of the biggest barriers to success for organizations and teams investing in artificial intelligence (AI). For one, you need a lot of it to create high-performing models. And what’s more, you need data that’s accurately ...
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25 Year Anniversary
This year, Appen is celebrating its 25th Anniversary in helping people access reliable training data to deploy their projects with confidence. As we look to the future, we’re also reflecting on the past. Looking back on where we’ve come from is how we can see our growth and can get a clear picture of how many people and companies we’ve ...
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Data Labeling Tools: How to Level up Your Process
From spam filtering to personalized chat bot experiences, AI innovations are becoming a facet of our everyday lives. Most companies, if they haven’t already, are considering adopting AI and machine learning tools in their internal and external processes. What many people don’t realize if they haven’t worked with AI and machine learning technology before is that you can’t just go ...
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Augmented and Virtual Reality AI Data: Powering the Next Big Thing
Augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) are two promising technologies that businesses are keeping an eye on. In fact, nearly three-quarters of industry leaders report that they expect these immersive technologies to be mainstream within the next five years and Goldman Sachs reports that the AR/VR industry will be worth $95 billion by 2025. At the same time, running in parallel ...
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Navigating the World of Machine Learning Datasets: Where to Find the Best Machine Learning Datasets
Many companies are turning to external datasets to launch AI successfully. We are now in an age where finding datasets is getting easier than ever before, and they are getting more and more important for the performance of machine learning models. There are many sites that host repositories for data that covers an incredible range of topics—from images of rare ...
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What is Sensor Fusion?
Sensor Fusion Shapes the Future of Connected Devices Sensors are used in almost every industry now: they’re found in our cars, in our factories, and even in our smartphones. While an individual sensor may provide useful data on its own, imagine the information that could be extracted from combining output from multiple sensors at once. This would give us a ...
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What is Audio Transcription?
How AI is Making Transcription More Efficient Human transcription has been around in some form for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Recently, it’s getting a boost with AI. Transcriptions themselves are the text form of the audio content; they enable a reader to comprehend what was said or what happened during a period of time without having to listen ...
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What is Human-centered AI?
The Future of AI Needs a Human Touch The rapid evolution of AI technology has generated much excitement around its potential to enhance our daily lives. As a result, AI experts are having frequent conversations around the best ways to leverage AI in our society and out of this dialogue has emerged the human-centered AI approach. Human-centered AI isn’t about ...
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What are Data Collection Solutions?
How to Collect Data Efficiently and Responsibly for Your AI Initiatives Data collection continues to be a major bottleneck for teams building artificial intelligence (AI). The reasons vary: there may be a lack of sufficient data for a use case, new machine learning (ML) techniques like deep learning require more data, or teams don’t have the right processes in place ...
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The Basics of Small Data: Actionable Data Provide a New Path Forward in AI
You may have heard the buzzword “big data” in the context of AI, but what about small data? Whether you’re aware of it or not, small data is all around you: it powers online shopping experiences, airline recommendations, weather reports, and more. Small data is data that’s in an accessible and actionable format and easily comprehensible by humans. Data scientists ...
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Verbatim vs. Intelligent Verbatim: Which Transcript Style to Choose, and When
Transcripts can be created in a range of styles and formats, depending on the scenario. Verbatim and intelligent verbatim are the two most common, but in order to choose the right one, it’s important to understand the differences between them. When it comes to creating a written record of the spoken word, the finished transcript can vary greatly depending on ...
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Data Science and Machine Learning Automation: What to Know About the State of Automation in AI
In the last decade, there have been many developments in the automation of artificial intelligence (AI) building. Frequently in dialogue about the future of AI, you may hear reference to data science automation and machine learning automation used interchangeably. In reality, these terms have distinct definitions: the current automated machine learning (known as AutoML) goals refer specifically to the automation ...
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Navigating the Transcription Process
Seven Simple Steps to Getting the Best Written Record As remote working becomes increasingly prevalent, more and more organizations are finding they need accurate written records of their virtual meetings and conference calls. Whether you are a first-timer or an existing customer, have you ever wondered how the transcription process works? Here’s Appen’s guide to what happens when. 1. Identify ...
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Don’t Start from Scratch When Building Machine Learning Models
How Leveraging Training Data with Pre-Trained Models Can Accelerate Your AI Projects It would probably be a safe bet to assume that most of the AI you’ve interacted with was built using supervised learning. Supervised learning, which is essentially building machine learning (ML) models from scratch, has been the key driver of artificial intelligence (AI) development so far, motivated by ...
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The Role of Data in Responsible AI: Data Decisions that Shape the Future of Ethical AI
There’s no question that artificial intelligence (AI) will continue its rapid evolution in the coming years and become increasingly interconnected with our daily lives. The onus is now on companies to approach AI with a responsible lens in order to maximize transparency, reduce bias, and guide ethical applications of the technology. AI that works well, after all, works equitably for ...
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What is Optical Character Recognition?
How Artificial Intelligence Gives OCR a Boost Artificial intelligence is transforming the capabilities of optical character recognition (OCR) tools. An area of computer vision, OCR processes images of text and converts that text into machine-readable forms. In other words, it takes handwritten or typed text within physical documents and converts them into digital formats. In the 1990s, many business owners ...
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What is AutoML?
Automated Machine Learning Uses and Approaches Explained As organizations seek to use machine learning in more diverse use cases, the amount of pre and post data processing and optimization scales exponentially. The difficulty to hire enough people to do all the tasks associated with advanced machine learning models makes automated tools for machine learning a critical component for the future ...
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Where eBay Went Right—and Wrong—With AI: What You Measure Matters
The following is adapted from Real World AI. I joined eBay back in 2006, and in 2009, the company was in very bad shape. Its share price was at a historical low, well off its near-$24 historical high; it was cutting costs, growth was negative, market share was shrinking, and the technology team wasn’t empowered to innovate. Put simply, the ...
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The Current State of AI 2021: Report Now Available
What You Need to Know About the Seventh Annual Industry Report In our seventh edition of the State of AI and Machine Learning Report, we continue to evaluate an industry that is changing rapidly year-over-year. Our goal with the report is to provide a current picture of the trends, priorities, and challenges faced by businesses building AI technology. Once again, ...
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Types of Errors We See with Training Data: How to Recognize and Avoid Common Data Error
It’s helpful to contrast AI development with traditional software development. In traditional software, you write code that’s deterministic (i.e., every time you run it with the same inputs, you’ll receive the same outputs). But with AI development, it’s not the code that’s most important, it’s the data. Specifically, the labeling of the data. High-quality, accurately-labeled data is crucial to building ...
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Responsible AI Across the Value Chain: Ethical Approaches to AI from Data to Deployment—and Beyond
It can’t be stated enough: it’s the responsibility of every organization creating artificial intelligence (AI) to do so ethically. Responsible, or ethical, AI is AI that’s unbiased, equitable, and improves the quality of life of everyone it touches. In practice, it requires AI practitioners to apply an ethical framework to every AI endeavor they pursue, ensuring the people, processes, and ...
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What is Training Data?
Machine Learning algorithms learn from data. They find relationships, develop understanding, make decisions, and evaluate their confidence from the training data they’re given. And the better the training data is, the better the model performs. In fact, the quality and quantity of your machine learning training data has as much to do with the success of your data project as ...
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Five AI Market Trends for 2021: Shifting Approaches to Data, Use Cases, and More
The field of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve at a rapid pace as companies learn and grow from their challenges and successes. More and more, companies are aligning on the foundational role that data plays in AI implementation. As a consequence, there are numerous exciting trends emerging within the data subdomain worth watching. These trends illustrate both the barriers ...
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What is Data Annotation?
Text, audio, image, or video becomes training data for machine learning through data annotation, with the help of people and technology. Building an AI or ML model that acts like a human requires large volumes of training data. For a model to make decisions and take action, it must be trained to understand specific information via data annotation. But what ...
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What is Data Labeling?
Everything You Need to Know About Data Labeling – Featuring Meeta Dash Artificial intelligence (AI) is only as good as the data it is trained with. With the quality and quantity of training data directly determining the success of an AI algorithm, it’s no surprise that, on average, 80% of the time spent on an AI project is wrangling training data, ...
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How to Get Started: Building Trustworthy AI in the European Union
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has tremendous potential to increase productivity, uncover new insights and create new experiences. But such a high potential technology demands that organizations build AI with a responsible lens in mind to make sure it nets a positive impact. The European Commission (EC) has taken steps to transform such recommendations into law and has recently expanded its product ...
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How to Reduce Bias in AI
Top Eight Ways to Overcome and Prevent AI Bias Algorithmic bias in AI is a pervasive problem. You can likely recall biased algorithm examples in the news, such as speech recognition not being able to identify the pronoun “hers” but being able to identify “his” or face recognition software being less likely to recognize people of color. While entirely eliminating ...
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Overcoming AI Deployment Challenges
5 Tips for Handling the Biggest AI Obstacles You may have heard the stat: over 80% of artificial intelligence (AI) projects never make it to deployment. While we expect to see that number decrease in the coming years, in the meantime companies face very real, and common, barriers to success. Lack of high-quality data, insufficient technical expertise, misalignment within the ...
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Machine Vision vs. Computer Vision — What’s the Difference?
Artificial Intelligence is an umbrella term that covers several specific technologies. In this post, we will explore machine vision (MV) vs. computer vision (CV). They both involve the ingestion and interpretation of visual inputs, so it’s important to understand the strengths, limitations, and best use case scenarios of these overlapping technologies. The Beginning of Computer Vision Researchers began developing computer-enabled ...
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3 Things Business Decision-Makers Must Do to Create Better AI
The following is adapted from Real World AI. It’s becoming increasingly clear that AI is the future for business. AI models can save time, increase efficiency, and drive revenue. As more and more businesses adopt AI, it soon won’t be a nice-to-have, but a must-have in order to compete in the marketplace. As a business decision-maker, that can be overwhelming. ...
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What is Text Annotation in Machine Learning?
Everything You Need to Know About Text Annotation with Yao Xu Every day, we interact with different media (such as text, audio, images, and video), relying on our brain to process what media we are seeing and make meaning out of it to influence what we do. One of the most common types of media is text, which makes up ...
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Secure Transcription Services for Sensitive Data
Maintaining the Highest Levels of Confidentiality During COVID-19 COVID-19 restrictions are challenging all service providers to come up with imaginative new ways to meet their clients’ needs. Appen is offering a two-part approach to transcribing confidential material that delivers high levels of confidentiality and protects our employees. Most transcription providers offer basic security measures, like staff vetting and agreed data ...
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The Value of AI: Exploring Opportunities and Challenges in AI Technology
Demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) practitioners and budgets for AI initiatives have never been higher. Digital transformation brought about by driving forces like the global pandemic have greatly accelerated development of AI and machine learning (ML) technology. More and more companies are figuring out how to unlock the value of AI and make it work in the real world, often to ...
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Response: Concerns regarding contractor onboarding
Recently, concerns have been expressed regarding one of our contractor onboarding questionnaires which included a voluntary demographic question about skin color. Appen’s role is to provide training data for AI that represents all users of the product so that the product is unbiased and works in the real world. Key to that is providing training data from diverse populations of ...
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What is Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning?
Human-in-the-loop (HITL) is a branch of artificial intelligence that leverages both human and machine intelligence to create machine learning models. In a traditional human-in-the-loop approach, people are involved in a virtuous circle where they train, tune, and test a particular algorithm. Generally, it works like this: First, humans label data. This gives a model high quality (and high quantities of) ...
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Exploring the World of LiDAR: What is it and How Does it Work?
LiDAR has served as a useful tool in many industries for decades, but only recently are we starting to realize its true potential with the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solutions. LiDAR, also known as light detection and ranging, is a remote sensing technology. It uses laser scanners to measure distances and dimensions between the sensor and target object, such ...
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Spelling Standardization: How Many Ways Can You Spell a Word?
Here's a topic that's near and dear to our hearts here at Appen: spelling standardization. How hard can that be? Oh boy. Follow us down the rabbit hole.
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You Can’t Just Use AI – You Must Lead With AI
The following is adapted from Real World AI. AI will soon be a necessary part of doing business. Every company will have an AI strategy in the same way that they have a social media strategy, branding strategy, talent strategy, etc. So if you want to stand out from the competition and gain an edge, you can’t just use AI; ...
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An Introduction to Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
Applying Machine Learning to Everyday Scenarios Human-machine-interaction is increasingly ubiquitous as technologies leveraging audio and language for artificial intelligence evolve. For many of our interactions with businesses—retailers, banks, even food delivery providers—we can complete our transactions by communicating with some form of AI, such as a chatbot or virtual assistant. Language is the foundation of these communications and, as a ...
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To Launch AI Successfully, Be Prepared to Scale
The following is adapted from Real World AI. When I worked in IBM’s Watson division, my team’s first demo quickly turned into a disaster, due to scaling issues. We were creating a visual-recognition application programming interface (API). Our first demo was a simple website that allowed users to drag-and-drop images, press a button, and be presented with a list of ...
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AI Data Acquisition and Governance
Best Practices for Deploying Successful AI If you aren’t working with artificial intelligence, you will be soon. We interact with AI nearly every day, forcing many companies to experiment in the space. No matter where you’re at, you will likely encountered some challenges along the way. Two of the more complex elements for successfully implementing AI within your business are ...
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Four Tips to Pick Your Goldilocks Problem for AI
Why Selecting The Right Business Problem to Use AI to Solve is Essential The Following is Adapted from Real World AI. When your company is just starting to explore AI, picking the first problem to solve is just as important as coming up with the AI solution itself. Pick a problem that’s too big or difficult, and your AI project ...
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ML Techniques: Active Learning vs Weak Supervision
A Comparison of Two Popular Machine Learning Techniques Machine learning (ML) has grown exponentially as a field, but a familiar roadblock remains for many businesses: data. Training ML algorithms traditionally requires enormous amounts of manually-labeled data. The sheer size of data needed is often not available at scale and costly, not to mention the time and effort required to label ...
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Video Annotation: What Is It and How Automation Can Help
The Benefits of Automated Video Annotation for Your AI Models Similar to image annotation, video annotation is a process that teaches computers to recognize objects. Both annotation methods are part of the wider Artificial Intelligence (AI) field of Computer Vision (CV), which seeks to train computers to mimic the perceptive qualities of the human eye. In a video annotation project, a ...
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AI Model Maintenance: A Guide to Managing a Model Post-Production
Managing Models Beyond the Initial Deployment You’ve built your artificial intelligence model, trained it, tested it, tuned it, deployed it to production – you’re even receiving great feedback from customers! It’s time to move on to your next challenge, right? Not quite. The reality is it’s only the beginning: the lifecycle of a machine learning model continues long after deployment. ...
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What is AI-Powered Search Relevance?
Search Relevance Optimization with Machine Learning Techniques When you type a query into your favorite online retailer’s search bar, what kind of results do you expect? Most customers today expect search engines to be highly accurate, relevant, and instantaneous in delivery. Search engines should offer a personalized experience and predict your needs – even if your wording or spelling is ...
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What Is Image Annotation and How Is It Used To Build AI Models?
How Companies Use Image Annotation to Produce High-Quality Training Data Image annotation is the foundation behind many Artificial Intelligence (AI) products you interact with and is one of the most essential processes in Computer Vision (CV). In image annotation, data labelers use tags, or metadata, to identify characteristics of the data you want your AI model to learn to recognize. ...
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Leveraging AI and Machine Learning for Content Moderation
How Machine Learning Optimizes Content Moderation The internet has over 4.5 billion users and growing, generating billions of images, video, messages, posts, and other content types every day. This content must be regulated in some way, as most of these internet users want to visit their favorite social media platforms or online retailers and have a safe, positive experience. Content ...
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The Four Key Challenges of AI in Financial Services
Financial Service Providers Should Plan for AI Roadblocks An influx of artificial intelligence (AI) investment in the financial services space has brought forward new questions around data security and transparency. These, among other challenges of AI in financial services, are particularly essential to address as data management practices evolve with the introduction of new AI solutions. Organizations must be aware of ...
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Where to Focus Artificial Intelligence Investments in Financial Services
Using a Customer-Centric Approach to Drive Revenue Artificial intelligence investments in financial services is no longer just an option for organizations looking to compete in the financial services space. Finance organizations that have invested in AI are already seeing widespread benefits in revenue increase, reduced costs, and greater security compliance. This is especially important given the financial services industry faces mounting ...
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AI Ethics: The Guide to Building Responsible AI
Ethical AI Techniques to Minimize Bias Throughout the Model Build Process Artificial intelligence ethics are often thought of in the context of the model itself. Meaning, the focus is on the ethical quality of a model’s prediction and outcome, as well as the impact it has. Even though most companies focus on reducing bias in their models, that’s not enough to ...
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How to Approach Data Collection for Conversational AI Agents
Training Conversational AI Agents on Noisy Data Chatbots, virtual assistants, robots, and more: conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is already highly visible in our daily lives. Companies looking to increase engagement with customers while reducing costs are investing heavily in the space. The numbers are clear: the conversational AI agents industry is expected to grow 20% year over year through at least ...
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How to Build Successful Computer Vision Applications at Scale
Navigating Computer Vision Projects From Prototype to Production Computer vision is quickly gaining traction in several industries as the availability of image data grows, and artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly paramount to companies worldwide. Computer vision, or CV, is a form of machine learning (ML) that helps computers see and interpret images similar to the human eye. By classifying images ...
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Five Challenges of Artificial Intelligence for Automotive Applications
What to Watch For When Scaling AI Applications in the Auto Industry As more companies invest in automotive artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, we come ever closer to the large-scale deployment of a Level 5, fully-automatic self-driving car. Automotive organizations looking to be part of this AI disruption should already be thinking ahead about how to deploy their artificial intelligence for automotive ...
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AI and Data Protection: Certifications and Regulations
Regulations You and Your Training Data Partner Need to Be Aware of to Minimize Risk It’s no secret that successful AI initiatives require time, money, and effort. But, a big roadblock to many models moving beyond experimentation has to do with data. High-quality training data often makes people think of very accurate data annotations, however, another important aspect of data ...
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How to Deploy AI with Confidence
Approaches to AI that Unlock Business Value Artificial intelligence (AI) is already transforming business, driving down costs, maximizing revenue, and enhancing customer experience. And many organizations are taking notice: The AI market size is expected to grow to $390.9 billion by 2025, and industries within the space show a similar trend—automotive AI, for example, is expected to grow by 35% year over year, and manufacturing ...
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What is Computer Vision?
Everything You Need to Know About Computer Vision With its recent surge in popularity, computer vision (CV) has become one of the fastest-growing fields of artificial intelligence (AI). The intended purpose of computer vision technology is to mimic the complexity of the human vision system, which includes eyes, receptors, and the visual cortex. This intricate system, when duplicated, gives machines ...
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Conversational AI: Making Smarter and more Scalable Models
Trends and Challenges in Conversational Artificial Intelligence Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is already present in many families’ living rooms, cars, and online shopping experiences. Chatbots, voice assistants, smart speakers, interactive voice recognition systems: all of these are examples of conversational AI. It’s an area that’s attracting significant investment given the increased accessibility it offers through enhanced customer experiences. In the ...
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Where to Focus Automotive Artificial Intelligence Investments Part Two: Out-of-Car Experience
Autonomous Vehicles: A Critical Focus for AI In Part One, we talked about how the market for AI-powered automotive solutions is expected to increase over ten-fold by 2025, the areas of opportunity for advancing the in-cabin experience, and the importance of having unbiased training data for AI models. In Part Two, we’ll cover key components of the out-of-car experience, rounding out ...
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Should You Build or Buy a Data Annotation Tool?
Key Considerations for Developing a Data Annotation Solution for Your AI Models You want to use artificial intelligence (AI) within your business, but how do you make sure you choose the best strategy moving forward? First, you’ve likely determined a business problem, an AI-based solution, and the use cases of that solution. But the next step is a little more ...
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How Off-the-Shelf Training Datasets Can Save Your ML Teams Time and Money
New Off-the-Shelf Datasets from Appen Creating a high-quality dataset with the right degree of accuracy for training machine learning (ML) algorithms can be a difficult uplift for getting AI and ML projects off the ground. Not every company has a specialized team of ML PhDs, data engineers, and human annotators at their disposal. This is largely due to the expense ...
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Where to Focus Automotive AI Investments: In-Cabin Experience
Automotive AI as an Instrument of Change and Profitability Never before has it been more critical for automotive companies to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. Tractica forecasts that the market for automotive AI hardware, software, and services will reach $26.5 billion by 2025, up from $1.2 billion in 2017. The potential for change is tremendous, with shifts from traditional to disruptive ...
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What is Natural Language Processing?
A Brief Introduction to NLP with Phoebe Liu Have you ever interacted with a chatbot? Or requested something from a virtual assistant like Siri, Alexa, or your car’s infotainment system? What about translating something online? Most of us have interacted with these types of artificial intelligence (AI) before, and never stopped to contemplate the ease with which we could communicate ...
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Train AI Summit 2020: Speakers and Sessions Announced
Registration Open for the Free 2020 Virtual Train AI Summit The annual Train AI Summit is just around the corner. It will continue to pair our experts with speakers from leading technology companies to share their experiences building and deploying AI. In this year’s virtual format, you’ll learn strategy and implementation tools available to you to help your organization deploy ...
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What Does Interoperability Mean for the Future of Machine Learning?
Interoperability, or the ability for two systems to communicate effectively, is a key factor in the future of machine learning. For banking, healthcare, and other everyday industries, we’ve come to expect that the platforms we use to exchange information can communicate seamlessly whenever we need them to. Because we all have hundreds of thousands of data points associated with our ...
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What is Text Annotation in Machine Learning?
Everything You Need to Know About Text Annotation with Yao Xu Every day, we interact with different media (such as text, audio, images, and video), relying on our brain to process what media we are seeing and make meaning out of it to influence what we do. One of the most common types of media is text, which makes up ...
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Is Your Organization AI-Ready?
New AI Readiness Assessment Tool Now Available Many companies overestimate whether they are AI-ready. In the 2020 CIO Survey, Gartner stated that only 19% of CIOs claimed their AI projects to be in production. Meaning that when it comes to deploying AI initiatives all the way to production, a whopping 80% don’t make it. At Appen, we’ve seen our customers ...
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How to Get Started with AIOps
What is AIOps, and Why is it the Future for IT Teams? As executives across industries evaluate the variety of ways that artificial intelligence (AI) can transform their businesses, one area garnering an increasing amount of attention is the evolution of IT systems to meet the demands of modern businesses, as AI migrates from the fringes to the center of ...
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What is Data Labeling?
Everything You Need to Know About Data Labeling – Featuring Meeta Dash Artificial intelligence (AI) is only as good as the data it is trained with. With the quality and quantity of training data directly determining the success of an AI algorithm, it’s no surprise that, on average, 80% of the time spent on an AI project is wrangling training data, ...
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Common Sense AI: Making Deep Learning Technologies More Human
Whether through devices we use to enable convenience at home or in the way products we use all the time are manufactured, AI's impact is everywhere, driving innovation in just about every aspect of our lives. But there are missing pieces to this puzzle that still cause frustration for end-users and present significant challenges for researchers trying to improve how AI technology performs.
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AI in E-commerce
AI in E-commerce and the New Era of Personalization As society chases convenience and turns increasingly to online shopping over the traditional brick and mortar retail model, e-commerce took center stage, evolving how customers shop. The idea of a personalized shopping experience for each customer has been around for a long time, but a new era of personalization is underway. ...
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State of AI 2020: Report Now Available
What You Need to Know About the Sixth Annual Industry Report We introduced the State of AI and Machine Learning Report over six years ago when AI and machine learning adoption was still in its infancy. Since then, the industry has grown significantly, with budgets, executive visibility, and ownership all increasing year-over-year. Despite rapid growth, there is more room for ...
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The Role of Quality Assurance in Artificial Intelligence
What You Need to Know About Quality Assurance for Your AI Models Launching an artificial intelligence (AI) model that’s accurate, reliable, and unbiased is undeniably a challenge. Organizations that manage to achieve success in AI initiatives are likely aware that the quality assurance (QA) process is very different with AI than traditional QA processes. Quality assurance plays a critical role ...
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Appen Machine Learning FAQ
Explore this machine learning FAQ for an overview of machine learning and artificial intelligence, including details about different methods and how you can invest. What is machine learning? Machine learning is the process of teaching a machine how to learn by providing it with guidance that helps them develop logic on its own and giving them access to datasets you ...
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What is Data Annotation?
Building an AI or ML model that acts like a human requires large volumes of training data. For a model to make decisions and take action, it must be trained to understand specific information. Data annotation is the categorization and labeling of data for AI applications. Training data must be properly categorized and annotated for a specific use case. With ...
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How to Reduce Bias in AI
Top Eight Ways to Overcome and Prevent AI Bias Algorithmic bias in AI is a pervasive problem. You can likely recall biased algorithm examples in the news, such as speech recognition not being able to identify the pronoun “hers” but being able to identify “his” or face recognition software being less likely to recognize people of color. While entirely eliminating ...
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How Artificial Intelligence is Reshaping Financial Services
Identifying AI Use Cases in FinServ in an Experience-First World Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to gain traction as a significant business driver for large organizations across major industries. The traditional financial services industry was known to be slower in adopting new technologies, with some organizations using software running on COBOL or Fortran, which was invented in the 50s and 60s. ...
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Spelling Standardization: How Many Ways Can You Spell a Word?
Here's a topic that's near and dear to our hearts here at Appen: spelling standardization. How hard can that be? Oh boy. Follow us down the rabbit hole.
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AI in Banking Operations
At Appen, we provide high-quality training data for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Follow us to stay up to date on industry trends. In this edition of our roundup, news on: applications of AI and machine learning in banking. Check back for regular news roundups and subscribe to our YouTube channel for video updates. https://youtu.be/5e-euX3s9VI Machine Learning in Banking: How ...
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Appen Offers Fully Integrated Figure Eight Solution
Deploy World-Class AI Confidently With High-Quality Training Data We’re thrilled to announce that the refreshed Appen website is live. With this refresh, we have also phased the www.figure-eight.com website out, and have successfully transitioned all former Figure Eight assets – the platform, developer portal, Success Center, and social media accounts. Redirects are in place for all links that have changed, and our team has been working with all our customers, users, partners, internal users, and the crowd to ensure a seamless transition to ...
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What is Training Data?
Algorithms learn from data. They find relationships, develop understanding, make decisions, and evaluate their confidence from the training data they’re given. And the better the training data is, the better the model performs. In fact, the quality and quantity of your training data has as much to do with the success of your data project as the algorithms themselves. Now, ...
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Crowd Survey Reveals How Appen Platform Helps During Global Pandemic
COVID-19 Impact Stories from Our One Million Crowd As we continue to provide access to projects for contributors working from home during the pandemic, we asked our global crowd what impact COVID-19 has had on them and how they are holding up during these challenging times of social distancing and quarantine. The 3,000 of responses returned overnight were filled with raw emotion – pointed personal stories, ranging from painful and difficult to hopeful and heartwarming. They reminded us that ...
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Crowd’s Collective Wisdom vs. Experts: Who Makes IBM Watson Smarter?
Understanding natural language is one of the great aspirations of artificial intelligence. While solving it could have exciting implications for society, it’s going to take an unprecedented volume of training data to make it happen. This is especially true in the interpretation of health data from a seemingly infinite array of sources — and a big reason why we’re so ...
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Improving Your Search Relevance Algorithm With Human Curated Data
In our previous post, we outlined the difference between Click Data and Human Curated Data metrics. Today, we’ll dig into the deeper use cases that require human curated data in particular. Why You Need Human Curated Data Tapping individual contributors to evaluate search results allows you to get explicit relevance judgments, which is a higher quality metric to optimize for ...
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How do you map out a conversation you haven’t even had yet?
Some conversations are easy to plan for. Take the cup of coffee you ordered this morning for example. Chances are it started with a reciprocal greeting and moved onto a request. Maybe there was a short back-and-forth hammering out small particulars (what size, do you need room for cream), followed by payment, and a quick exchange of thank yous and ...
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How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Auto Industry in an Experience-First World
Consumer-Experience AI for Automotive Artificial intelligence’s impact continues to expand rapidly across all major industries, with companies around the globe investing heavily in AI technologies to advance their competitive edge. Future trends suggest that without adopting an AI strategy now, organizations are likely to fall far behind their competitors. When implemented correctly, AI and machine learning (ML) will deliver wide-sweeping ...
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Working In The Future: Embracing Work from Home
Work from Home Options Help Ease Global Impact Since 2010, remote work has increased by 91%. In today’s world, though, working from home is becoming less of an option and more of a requirement. Fortunately, there are many industries that enable people to do that – like customer service, design, software development, online tutoring, and data annotation. Many of these ...
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COVID-19 Update; Our Customers, Partners, Employees, and Crowd
I hope that you, your families, friends and colleagues are all safe and well. Like all businesses, we are responding to the rapidly changing situation of the COVID-19 pandemic with the interests of our staff, our global crowd of skilled contractors and our customers as our primary concerns. Appen is a people-first business. From day one, concern for the wellbeing ...
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Top 6 Trends for AI Initiatives Going into 2020
2020 Predictions in Artificial Intelligence to Consider When Operationalizing AI Developments With 2019 hardly fading in the rear-view mirror, it’s a good time to take a step back and see what’s in store for the next 12 months. For those managing and implementing AI and ML projects and deployments, it’s been a rapidly evolving ecosystem, and 2020 will be no ...
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How to Build a Successful Task for the Crowd
I built my first job on Mechanical Turk more than seven years ago. I immediately saw the power of the crowd, but the process was difficult enough that I started CrowdFlower, now Appen, to give people like me a better experience and more accurate results. Since then I’ve created thousands of jobs myself and looked at countless microtasks built by ...
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Appen Recognized in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 & 500
Appen Celebrates its Sixth Year of Representation in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Australia Awards After an exciting year of growth, Appen has been recognized for the sixth time in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Australia Awards. This year marks the second year that we have received recognition in the leadership category. The Leadership category recognizes technology companies who have ...
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AI at Finovate Summit: Beyond the Hype
Traditionally, FinTech companies have been early adopters of new technologies enabling them to maintain their differentiation. Thanks to this, AI and FinTech are a natural match – especially as AI edges into the mainstream of enterprise software. At Appen, we are always looking for product-market fit when it comes to machine learning and data annotation solutions. To find out whether ...
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How a Driverless Future Will Impact All of Us
In all cases, a driverless future is coming ... the question that remains is when.
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Data Trends in the Zettabyte Era
Without a well-defined strategy for collecting and structuring the data you need to train, test, and tune your AI systems, you run the risk of delayed projects, not being able to scale appropriately, and ultimately, competitors outpacing you.
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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Industry News: AI in Patient Care and Operations, AI as a Preventive Tool, and How Major Hospitals are Already Using AI
Expect to see dramatic changes in both patient health outcomes and in the operational efficiency of hospitals.
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The Latest Innovations in Artificial Intelligence
What are some of the most recent developments in AI? With so many emerging applications for artificial intelligence making a splash across a wide range of industries, it can be difficult to keep up. This post will touch on some cool advances made in 2019 and look at what’s on the horizon. AI takes a deep dive Robotics is a ...
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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Industry News: AI Trends Transforming the Way We Do Business
Organizations should have a reliable source of clean data to extract from and work with.
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O’Reilly San Jose: Creating Autonomy for Social Robots
This year’s O’Reilly AI conference in San Jose, CA delivered the usual mix of exciting presentations and dynamic discussions, as well as a healthy dose of industry networking. Appen is proud to have been given the opportunity to share some recent research at the conference that promises to improve the way robots interact with people. In their presentation Creating Autonomy ...
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Creating Chatbots and Virtual Assistants That Really Work
Chatbots and their more sophisticated counterparts, virtual assistants, have emerged as a key tool to streamline customer service operations for organizations in a wide range of industries, and to help reduce costs.
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Appen Around the Globe: Fall 2019 Conference Rundown
Appen’s team of machine learning experts is excited to connect with you this fall. We’ll be exhibiting at industry conferences all over the world in the next few months and would love the opportunity to demonstrate how our high-quality training data can take your organization’s machine learning programs to the next level. Click here to schedule a meeting with the ...
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CVPR 2019: Progress and Challenges in the Field of Computer Vision
The annual Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition conference is packed with insightful presentations and top industry experts. With nearly 10,000 attendees and 1,200 papers, CVPR 2019 in Long Beach, CA was no exception. In this post, we’ll take a brief look at some notable presentations delivered at the conference for solving numerous computer vision and pattern recognition challenges. Data augmentation ...
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Cost-Effective Crowdsourcing Strategies for Dialogue Systems
In a recent paper entitled Optimizing the Design and Cost for Crowdsourced Conversational Utterances, Appen data scientist Phoebe Liu and her team worked to identify cost-effective crowdsourcing strategies for training dialogue systems such as chatbots. Because more industries are adopting chatbot technology for customer service and other key functions, a need has emerged for training these systems as quickly and ...
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How to Solve Common Data Challenges in Conversational Design
When planning the development of a chatbot or virtual assistant, it’s important to begin the conversational design process with a clear data strategy in place. Conversational design requires more than just an understanding of the fundamentals of voice user interface design — you also need to understand how to solve some of the key challenges in data preparation. Working with the ...
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Appen on the Road: Events & Trade Shows this Summer
Appen is gearing up for some of the world’s leading industry events this summer. Our team will be exhibiting at conferences and trade shows around the globe, showing organizations how our services and solutions help develop high-quality training data for machine learning. Planning to attend one of these events? Contact us to set up a meeting with one of our ...
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5 Reasons to Outsource Your Data Annotation Projects
For many organizations, the temptation to annotate data for machine learning (ML) projects in-house is hard to deny. These companies typically feel that using internal resources will help them save time and money by tapping employees who are already on their payroll. Additionally, if their project is highly confidential or of a sensitive nature, they might feel that using internal ...
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Appen Recognized by Translators Without Borders
Appen is pleased to announce that we have received a 2019 Donor Award from Translators Without Borders (TWB). The award is part of TWB’s annual Access to Knowledge award program, which honors individuals and organizations who donate their time, passion, and skills to make sure people around the world have access to knowledge in a language and format they understand. ...
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Three of the Most Innovative Automotive AI Applications at AutoSens Detroit
Appen recently exhibited at AutoSens Detroit, where we shared our approach to data collection and annotation for in-car navigation, infotainment, and monitoring, as well as autonomous vehicle solutions. Here are some of the coolest innovations in automotive AI, as spotted by our team: Mercedes Benz’s Intelligent Interior Volker Entenmann, Senior Manager of UI Functions at Daimler AG, shared how Mercedes-Benz ...
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Insights from the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing
Appen recently sponsored the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (iCASSP) in Brighton. Our VP of Business Development in Europe, Dorota Iskra, shares some insights from her experience there. With an extensive background in speech and language technology, Dorota holds a PhD in Computer Science and Speech Recognition from the University of Birmingham. After focusing on the ...
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Appen Becomes Leading Language Service Provider; Maintains Leading Position in APAC
Appen is excited to announce our official ranking as one of the largest language service providers (LSPs) in the global translation and interpreting industry. Issued May 2019 by independent market research firm Common Sense Advisory (CSA Research), “The Fastest-Growing LSPs: 2019” ranked Appen as a top-grossing LSP in the US$46.52 billion global market for outsourced language services and technology. Appen’s ...
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How to Remove Bias in Training Data
Machine learning (ML) algorithms are generally only as good as the data they are trained on. Bias in ML training data can take many forms, but the end result is that it can cause an algorithm to miss the relevant relations between features and target outputs. Whether your organization is a small business, global enterprise, or governmental agency, it’s essential ...
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How a Tier 1 Automotive Software Provider Creates Smarter, More Natural In-Car Infotainment Systems
For an in-car infotainment system — or any ASR system — to recognize and correctly process voice commands, it must be trained on speech data that accounts for a broad range of inputs and all possible variation in how people speak.
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Using AI to Transform the Banking Experience
At the FinovateSpring 2019 conference in San Francisco, AI was a hot topic. From financial institutions using AI to power everything from personalized customer experiences to underwriting, to fintech providers showcasing AI solutions, the technology was on everyone’s mind. In a panel titled “Which Artificial Intelligence Technologies Will Really Change Financial Services?”, we heard from experts who are harnessing this technology in ...
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Improving the Accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition Models for Broadcast News
There is still a gap to close between human and machine performance, demonstrating a continued need for research on automatic transcription for broadcast news. Appen is ready to make your speech recognition project a success.
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How a Top Automotive OEM Localizes Its In-Car Experience with Appen
The Situation With the proliferation of mobile devices, consumers expect to stay connected, no matter where they are — especially in their car. Voice recognition in cars, however, continues to be the leading complaint among new vehicle owners. Global automotive manufacturers recognize the demand for better connectivity but face added complexities associated with localizing in-car systems for multiple languages. Data ...
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How to Create Training Data for Computer Vision Use Cases
For simple computer vision projects, such as recognizing a pattern in a group of images, publicly available image datasets will usually suffice to train your machine learning models. But for more complex CV applications, how can you get the vast amounts of training data you need to create an accurate solution? In this post, we explain training data requirements for ...
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Solving ML Training Data Challenges at Google Cloud Next
Appen recently exhibited at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco, our first event with our new colleagues from Figure Eight. Joining over 30,000 developers, product managers, data scientists, and more, we spent three days networking, learning, and problem solving. The event covered diverse topics ranging from data analytics and DevOps to networking, security, and storage. But we on the Appen ...
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Computer Vision vs. Machine Vision — What’s the Difference?
Artificial Intelligence is an umbrella term that covers several specific technologies. In this post, we will explore machine vision (MV) and computer vision (CV). They both involve the ingestion and interpretation of visual inputs, so it’s important to understand the strengths, limitations, and best use case scenarios of these overlapping technologies. Researchers began developing computer-enabled vision technologies as early as ...
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How Deep Learning is Transforming the Insurance Industry
Last week I attended the Deep Learning Finance conference organized by RE•WORK. As the event was smaller compared to many AI conferences I have attended, it had a more casual vibe which allowed for more open conversations about how people are using AI, some of their data challenges, and their overall goals. The insurance industry is transforming through the use ...
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RE·WORK’s Q&A with Wilson Pang, CTO of Appen
This week, Appen is exhibiting at RE•WORK’s Deep Learning in Finance Summit in London. The summit helps business leaders, data scientists, and engineers discover advances in AI & machine learning tools and techniques from the world’s leading innovators across the financial sector. RE•WORK spoke with Appen CTO Wilson Pang to learn about his current work, the challenges of implementing AI, ...
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Why Human-Annotated Data is Key to Machine Learning: Three Use Cases
Machine learning requires high volumes of data for training, validation, and testing. A machine learning model learns to find patterns in the input that is fed to it. This input is referred to as training data. As you train your solution to form relationships between variables, it’s important to have the right data, structured in the right format, covering all ...
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What New Jobs Will AI Create?
The boom in deep learning technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) can cause varying degrees of excitement or anxiety — largely depending on how you earn your paycheck. Advances in this field are creating exciting opportunities for companies seeking to maximize efficiency and quality, while minimizing costs traditionally associated with a mostly-human workforce. In manufacturing, implementation ...
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Want to Build a Better Computer Vision System? Give it the Right Training Data.
For a company to build a comprehensive dataset of annotated images takes considerable time and resources. Outsourcing the data collection and annotation efforts can help companies scale quickly.
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Appen’s Top Five Blog Posts from 2018
2018 was an exciting year here at Appen. We expanded into nine offices worldwide, and our global crowd of skilled annotators has grown to over 1 million people, working in over 130 countries and 180 languages. Our readers subscribe to Appen’s blog to stay on top of machine learning use cases, industry news, and best practices for getting high-quality training ...
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What is Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning?
Human-in-the-loop (HITL) is a branch of artificial intelligence that leverages both human and machine intelligence to create machine learning models. In a traditional human-in-the-loop approach, people are involved in a virtuous circle where they train, tune, and test a particular algorithm. Generally, it works like this: First, humans label data. This gives a model high quality (and high quantities of) ...
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Recent AI Developments in China
China is now a leading global hub for AI development. Startups and major tech companies like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and DiDi Chuxing are developing cutting edge products, solutions, and services using artificial intelligence. The AI market in China is massive. China’s AI Development Report 2018, a study from Tsinghua University, says, “The market value of China’s AI industry reached 23.7 ...
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Executive Insights from AI Summit NYC
At the 2018 AI Summit in New York City, we heard from a panel of executives representing multiple organizations across the AI ecosystem, including our own Mark Brayan, CEO of Appen. The panelists shared their perspectives on the usage of AI in different organizations, issues that need to be addressed, and what the future holds. Perspectives on AI Applications Clayton ...
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Announcing the Launch of Appen’s New China Website
Appen is excited to connect with our clients and prospects in China with a fully translated site, Appen.com.cn. The launch of our full-service Chinese site will help companies explore the wide range of Appen’s training data collection and annotation solutions and services available in China. Appen expanded to China with the opening of its Beijing office in 2017. China is ...
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How AI Is Driving Innovation In eCommerce And Retail
Companies across a range of industries are adopting machine learning technologies — and as early adopters, eCommerce and retail companies have seen the biggest wins from investing in machine learning. By applying artificial intelligence to key business problems, eCommerce companies are using machine learning models to drive higher sales, predict demand, and personalize the shopping experience through more relevant search ...
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Appen Recognized in the 2018 Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Australia Awards for Leadership
Following 102% growth in annual revenue from the previous year, Appen celebrates our fifth year of recognition in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Australia Awards. In 2018, Appen was newly awarded in the Leadership category, which recognizes technology companies who have generated cumulative operating revenues greater than $50M. “It’s an honor to receive this award from Deloitte.” said Mark Brayan, ...
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Machine Learning is Here to Stay
Welcome to the fourth industrial revolution—a world where artificial intelligence (AI) drives today’s technological disruption, blurring the lines between tangible and digital realities. Companies continue to shift toward AI and machine learning (ML) processes, and business leaders are quickly realizing the potential gains from investing in them. These gains include faster, smarter automation, predictive analytics, and new-and-improved ways to establish ...
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Appen Founders Nominated For 2018 Innovation Award
We are excited to share that Appen founders Chris and Dr. Julie Vonwiller have been nominated for the 2018 Innovation Awards sponsored by GQ Australia!
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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Industry News: AI in Retail, Interactive Vending Machines, and Voice Recognition
In this edition of our roundup, news on: AI in Retail, Interactive Vending Machines, and Voice Recognition.
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How top financial services companies transform their business with AI
In 2018, the financial services industry is using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to drive greater speed and accuracy across business processes. Using AI and machine learning technology, financial services companies are reducing risk, managing fraud, optimizing investment strategies, improving operational efficiency, and delivering more personalized customer service, at scale. Why is the financial industry seeing so much benefit ...
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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Industry News: London Metropolitan Police, MIT Drug Research, and AI Art at Auction
In this edition of our roundup, news on: London Metropolitan Police, MIT Drug Research, and AI Art at Auction.
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Insights From O’Reilly Media’s Artificial Intelligence 2018 Conference
Appen exhibited at the September 5–7 O’Reilly Media Artificial Intelligence 2018 conference in San Francisco to showcase its high-quality data services. The event hosts industry experts and features case studies about the future of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The Appen team attended a variety of sessions at The AI Conference, San Francisco including: Have we reached peak human? The ...
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How a Leading Software Provider Optimized its Global eCommerce Funnel
A Top-10 Multinational Software Company + Appen A leading software provider needed to understand and improve its eCommerce purchasing path in multiple international markets. They partnered with Appen to design and conduct a usability study in key markets, in multiple languages. The Situation Understanding the nuances of the customer journey and evaluating the effectiveness of an eCommerce transaction funnel can ...
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Investing in AI: The Time is Now
According to industry research firm TechEmergence, Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology will have the single most radical, transformational impact on business and society. AI is driving the fourth industrial revolution or 4IR—the newest industrial era, which is characterized by emerging technological disruption and increasingly blurred lines between the physical and digital worlds. Organizations are rapidly exploring the business gains that can ...
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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Industry News: Robot Hands, Google Glass, and AI in China
In this inaugural edition of our roundup, news on: robotic hands, Google Glass, and AI in China.
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Meet Us on the Road in September!
It’s shaping up to be a busy September for the Appen team as we will be participating in a variety of industry events around the world, sharing how we can help firms improve their machine learning training data. Planning to attend one of these events? Contact us to set up a meeting with one of our experts, or stop by ...
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Fun Ways to Spend More Time With Your Dog With a Work-at-Home Job
In your home office, having a dog around can improve productivity and reduce stress in your workflow. Here are 10 ways you can spend more time with your dog with a work-at-home job.
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Machine Learning Adoption by Industry: A Q&A with Stephen Woodard
As artificial intelligence and machine learning become a greater part of the business landscape, it’s interesting to see how different vertical industries are putting it to use. How does healthcare compare to the technology sector? Do geography and location play a role? To answer some of these questions, I caught up with our own Stephen Woodard from our business development ...
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Where Retailers Should Invest in AI
Several weeks ago, we shared a detailed report from the McKinsey Global Institute that analyzes hundreds of use cases for artificial intelligence (AI), and provides a perspective on how firms across a variety of industries can most benefit from this exciting technology. One area featured in the report is AI in the retail industry. According to the research highlights, use ...
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Why Data Governance is Vital for AI and ML
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a prime example that highlights why the quality and quantity of data are both critical for successful machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives.
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8 Reasons Why Open Source Machine Learning Frameworks Still Rule the Landscape
For the past four years, we’ve taken the pulse of the data science community with our annual Data Scientist Survey. 2018, of course, is no difference. And while we confirmed a few things we anticipated–namely, that data scientists love their jobs and that more and more of their work is being used for AI projects–one thing we didn’t totally anticipate ...
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Key Considerations; Getting Started With Machine Learning
When implementing any strategic initiative, it’s important for organizations to build a considered plan upfront taking in a number of variables. This principle certainly holds true in the fast emerging areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
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Appen Recognized Among Largest Language Service Providers in the World
We are excited to announce our official ranking as one of the largest language service providers (LSPs) in the global translation and interpreting industry.
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AI Use Cases; Which Can Have the Most Impact on Your Business?
With all the hype around AI, how can organizations determine where best to apply the technology?
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Insights from TU Automotive 2018: How Realists and Dreamers See Autonomous Cars Differently
The Appen team exhibited at the June 6-7 TU Automotive 2018 conference in Detroit. TU Automotive is the world’s largest conference on automotive technology related to the connected car. The show hosts industry experts and features case studies about the future of autonomous vehicles. Our team at TU Auto attended a variety of seminars, including one by Andrew Hart, Director of SBD Labs, ...
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The Benefits of Artificial Intelligence are Enhancing the Business Landscape
The unstoppable march of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning is already touching our lives in so many ways. But its effects have only just begun to take hold.
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Great Machine Learning Data: It’s Not About Quantity or Quality — It’s About Both
To build a successful solution, you need the right data – and a lot of it.
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How AI is Shifting Gears with Intelligent Automation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being adopted by industries around the world as organizations seek to uncover new efficiencies and capabilities. Adopters of AI are improving business processes and boosting their profitability while creating better experience for their customers and their employees through intelligent automation. AI systems are not just changing how we interact with our devices and digital virtual ...
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Breaking New Ground in Online Customer Experiences: Flamingo AI and Appen
Low online sales conversion rates. Inefficient customer service. These are the problems Flamingo is solving with its game-changing machine learning technology focused on the field of conversational commerce. Using Appen and Amazon Web Services to power its virtual-assistant platforms, the machine learning company now creates better online experiences and enables conversational commerce for financial ...
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Insights from AI NextCon 2018: How LinkedIn Uses AI to Optimize the User Experience
When it comes to building its AI platform, the LinkedIn team’s goal has been to make end-to-end machine learning easy, fast, robust and automatic.
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Meet Up with Us at these Upcoming Spring Events
We’ll be on the road this Spring exhibiting at leading industry events around the world, talking with firms that are looking to improve their data for machine learning. Planning to attend one of these events? Contact us to set up a meeting or stop by our booth to learn how Appen can help you optimize your machine learning algorithms with high-quality, ...
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Here’s How Machine Learning Will Impact Healthcare
With $150 billion expected to be spent by the healthcare industry on AI deployment and tools over the next decade, machine learning in healthcare is on the rise. Healthcare innovators see the potential for machine learning use cases in healthcare to dramatically improve administrative functions, pharmaceutical research, clinical decision making, and patient monitoring. These enhancements will lead to more positive ...
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Recent Developments in Neural Networks
What are neural networks and deep learning? An artificial neural network is a computer simulation that attempts to model the processes of the human brain in order to imitate the way in which it learns. Such systems essentially teach themselves by considering examples, generally without task-specific programming by humans, and then use a corrective feedback loop to improve their performance. This ...
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Insights from Conversational Interaction 2018: NLP, Chatbots, and Comedians
Prithivi Pradeep, Appen VP of Business Development, and I recently attended Conversational Interaction in San Jose, CA. The conference provides companies and individuals a great opportunity to share and learn about the resources and knowledge that allow them to embrace AI. The importance of Artificial Intelligence technology has been emphasized by influential corporate executives and thoughtful analysts alike. Conversational interfaces are a major ...
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5 Machine Learning Use Cases that are Making a Difference in the Business World
Companies that are using machine learning are starting to reap the rewards and transform the way they do business. Machine learning is allowing businesses to optimize operations, deliver better customer experiences, enhance security and more. As enterprises race to stand out from the competition and do more with the same resources, machine learning is becoming an important investment. Here are ...
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Global Tech Firm Reaches New Markets with Enhanced Child Speech System
When designing a voice recognition system, it’s important that the speech system understands everyone speaking to it. But what happens when a speech recognition system doesn’t account for children’s speech? Most speech recognition platforms are only designed with adults in mind. Child speech is very different than adult speech, and not all speech recognition devices are well-equipped to deal with ...
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Appen Wraps Up 2017 with Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Award
Appen won two high-profile awards in December 2017: the Deloitte Asia Pacific Technology Fast 500 award and the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Australia award! “Deloitte is highly respected, and it’s an honor to receive this recognition.” said Mark Brayan, Appen CEO. “These awards highlight our role in the ever-growing artificial intelligence and machine learning markets. We’re excited to continue to ...
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Meet Up with Us at Upcoming Events
We’ll be on the road in January, February and March sharing our high-quality data expertise. Planning to attend one of these events and interested in speaking with our team? Contact us to set up a meeting, attend our speaking engagement, or stop by our booth to learn how Appen can help you optimize your machine learning algorithms with high-quality data. Conversational ...
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Appen’s Expertise Ensures eCommerce Retailer’s Scalability
A global eCommerce company needed support for one-time evaluation projects. Appen's on-demand crowd and project management expertise were a perfect fit.
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Insights from AI Expo 2017: Deep Learning in the Enterprise
I recently attended a keynote session at the AI Expo 2017 called “The Application of Deep Learning within an Enterprise”, a panel featuring speakers across a variety of industries. The executives on the panel highlighted a wide variety of use cases for machine learning in their organizations, beyond what one would expect. For example, Vadim Kutsyy, Distinguished Architect, Data Science from ...
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Creating Structured Data for Machine Learning at Appen
Tammy Garves and Phil Hall are Appen’s Senior Vice Presidents, the counterparts at the helm of the two main divisions of our company. Tammy leads our Content Relevance team. Phil heads up Language Resources. We caught up with them recently to talk about the need for structured data for machine learning. They also touch on industry trends, predictions, and why ...
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Insights from Crowdsourcing Week 2017 | Microsoft Discusses the Secret to Successful AI
Crowdsourcing - best practices and innovation learned at Crowdsourcing Week (CSW) 2017 in Seattle.
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Meet Us on the Road in November
This November, we’re making stops on both coasts to share our high-quality data expertise. Planning to attend one of these events and interested in speaking with our team? Contact us to set up a meeting, or stop by our booth to learn how Appen can help you solve your data challenges. Open Data Science Conference – November 3-4, Hyatt Regency ...
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New Discoveries: Pashto Language and Intonation Patterns
Last month, I presented cutting-edge research on the Pashto language, which is a language from Afghanistan and Pakistan, at Interspeech in Stockholm. The paper, titled Pashto Intonation Patterns, was co-written with Appen’s Director of Linguistic Services, Judith Bishop, and Senior Linguistic Project Manager, Mim Corris. It was based on data used in a project that began in Autumn 2014 and ...
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5 Things We Learned at O’Reilly’s AI Conference
There are no shortages of AI conferences out there, but the event the folks from O’Reilly threw this past week is one of the best in recent memory. They managed to couple immersive business keynotes with technical takes of the state-of-the-art in AI. And while we saw tons we enjoyed, here are a few things that stood out: Algorithmic bias ...
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Why does human-annotated data matter for search? Learn at Lucene/Solr Revolution
Search is a critical component of any effective website or application, connecting users to the data they need to make decisions, whether it’s to find documents, do research or complete an online purchase. Modern search engines have evolved significantly in the past 5 years, incorporating machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques in all aspects of document and query processing, as ...
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Teaming Up to Deliver AI to the Financial Services Industry
Financial services providers are investing in AI-based technologies, such as Flamingo's AI 'Rosie', to provide a world class customer experience.
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AI Requires a Human Touch: How Appen Recruits Crowds to Improve Technology
Kerri Reynolds, Sr. VP of Human Resources and Crowdsourcing, shares insights into crowdsourcing and crowd recruiting.
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5 Overlooked Search Engine Issues that Steal Your Sales
In working with a variety of eCommerce companies using different types of search platforms, we’ve seen some key issues thata your current analytics tools may not be telling you about. Download our whitepaper today.
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Improving Local Search Results for Enhanced User Experience
When a search engine provider needed to keep up with business listing demand, it turned to Appen to ensure accuracy.
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Local Knowledge Provides Enhanced Accuracy for Mobile Maps
Accuracy is the key to success for navigation applications. Appen developed a highly efficient testing system to improve directions for mobile maps.
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Delivering Personalization to a Global Market
Consumers want more relevant content. Appen helped a company improve the personalization of its news feed and deliver to their global user base.
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Sourcing In-market Expertise for Software Localization
A software provider required a Common Locale Data Repository software update. Appen helped provide the in-market knowledge for 66 new markets.
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Improving Natural Language Recognition for Leading Social Media Firm
A leading social media company needed large amounts of data to improve machine learning. Appen helped them secure the data needed to enhance the model. Read more.
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Improving Search Quality for Microsoft Bing in Multiple Markets
Improving results of the Bing search engine requires improving algorithms. Appen provides data collection support to optimize performance.
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Appen Propels Social Network Growth
A major social network provider needed to improve search functionality. Appen helped the provider improve data quality and support project demands quickly.
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Image Processing User Cases
Most business applications of computer vision involve identifying what’s actually inside an image. And because visual information is so dense with information, there’s a lot of work to be done. However, rather than replacing human beings, though, computer vision capabilities are most commonly augmenting human beings. To put it another way: computer vision projects generally are about creating a workflow ...
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Appen Gears Up for Big Presence at Interspeech 2017
Appen to present research on speech recognition, speaker comparisons, and Pashto speech data at this year's Interspeech conference.
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Empowering a Community and Enabling Linguistic Research
Through a partnership with ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL), Appen linguists focus on enabling linguistic research.
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Supporting the Artificial Intelligence Market in China: Appen Office in Bejing
Appen's newly opened office in Beijing will help build a presence within the Chinese technology market and further develop local capability.
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Insights from Chief Data Officer Summit 2018: Delivering a Superior Customer Experience with Data
Companies are looking for answers on how to integrate data to create a superior customer experience for their product.
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Artificial Intelligence in the Automotive Industry: Appen Establishes Detroit Office
Appen has officially opened an office in Detroit, Michigan, allowing us to better support our growing client list in the automotive industry.
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Appen’s Growth Fueled by Tech Trends and Executive Leadership
Appen's growth trajectory has kept pace with a flourishing tech industry, fueled by the latest tech trends and executive leadership. Read more.
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How does machine learning work? An interview with Appen CEO
Appen CEO, Mark Brayan, shares his thoughts on artificial intelligence, machine learning and the high-quality data they both rely on.
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Appen Prize for Excellence in Linguistics Awarded at Sydney University
Appen awards 7th annual Appen Prize for Excellence to Sydney University linguistics student William Peralta for outstanding academic results.
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The Impact of Video Evidence in Court UK
The potential to provide quality evidence that can be shared easily by Criminal Justice System partners is a game changer.
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Insights from Big Data Innovation Summit 2017: Six Steps to Harness Unstructured Data
Organizations may be struggling with where to begin with machine learning when they consider the vast amounts of unstructured data they produce.
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When Traditional Conversion Tactics Fail: Internal Site Search Experience Optimization (iSXO)
The eCommerce world needs a way to differentiate between traditional SEO and a shopper's search experience on-site. iSXO is the answer.
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How Structured Data Leads to Higher Ad Revenue
A leading search engine provider needed to know whether their ads were performing. The provider turned to Appen to accurately measure and optimize results. Read case study.
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Working with Children: Helping Machines Understand Child Speech
Children speak very differently to adults – and not all speech recognition devices are well equipped to deal with this.
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Supplying the Fuel for Advanced Language Technology
Machine learning techniques are used in many advanced language technologies, and Appen supplies the "fuel" for building and improving them.
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Insights from LocWorld China 2017 | Data is Key
Key takeaways from this year's LocWorld China, one of the leading conferences for translation, localization and global website management.
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When Speech Recognition Goes Wrong
Even the best speech recognition isn't 100% accurate. And when things go wrong, the errors can be glaring, if not occasionally entertaining.
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You Have Blind Spots When It Comes to Your Site Search
People are better than robots at many things, including evaluating how well your on-site search engine is performing.
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NLP Strategy | Insights from Conversational Interaction Conference 2017
While every enterprise has a Big Data strategy, few have an Natural Language Processing (NLP) data strategy. Do you?
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Going Global: The Value of Local Market Research & Resources
Companies entering multiple markets can create better customer experiences using in-market resources for testing, data collection and more.
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What’s Your Tail Telling You? How to Use Search Query Data to Increase eCommerce Conversion Rate
Does your retail website have a search engine? Then you’re sitting on a treasure trove of search query data. Make your data work for you.
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Insights from AI Frontiers Conference 2017 | Trends in AI
Autonomous Driving, Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning were key topics at this year's AI Frontiers Conference.
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The Hunt for Human Speech Data
How can we improve voice activated devices’ abilities to better understand and communicate with us? Human speech data, terabytes of it.
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Insights from AI World 2016 | Top Takeaways
While the concept of AI is not new, the technology is experiencing a rebirth in the form of machine learning and cognitive computing.
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Training Data Budgets
Organizations build machine learning systems so that they can predict and categorize data. But to get a system to do anything, you have to train it. This post is meant to help you figure out a budget for training data based on best practices. I’ll share specific numbers, but at the outset, I have to say something unsatisfying: the amount ...
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Appen Struck Gold; Language Services with MMG Acquisition
Language services & technology company Appen announced on October 4, 2016 the acquisition of UK-based transcription provider Mendip Media Group.
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Making AI work for your business
When it comes to the future of doing business, AI and machine learning are the hottest topics around. For all the discussion of AI’s promise, though, something is still lacking — straightforward information about how to make AI work for you. If you approach your solution in the wrong way your results won’t make sense, but if you go about ...
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Global Issues: Understanding Brexit with data from 87 countries
Pretty much everybody has heard by now that on June 23, citizens of the UK voted by a narrow margin to leave the European Union. This was one of the most hotly contested political issues in many years — not just for UK and EU residents, but around the world. The news sent shock waves through the global economy, and ...
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What the GOP Debate taught us about machine learning
While large swaths of Twitterdom were playing drinking games during the GOP Debate two nights ago, we had some fun of our own playing with our machine learning classifier. Here’s what we learned: What worked out well Our classifier really excelled in two important categories: candidate identification and sentiment. Correctly distinguishing candidates was something we thought we’d see, since, in ...
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Crowdsourced Data: When to Use Curated Crowds vs. Crowdsourcing
“When should I use crowdsourcing and when should I use a managed crowd?” Find out which is best for you human annotated data needs.
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Appen and Best Doctors Partnering in the IBM Watson Ecosystem
Appen and Best Doctors announce partnership through IBM Watson Ecosystem to enhance Best Doctors knowledge base of medical information.
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Appen Named in Forbes Magazine as One of the Top 100 Companies Offering Telecommuting Jobs in 2015
Appen Named in Forbes Magazine as One of the Top 100 Companies Offering Telecommuting Jobs in 2015
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Deloitte Technology Secured by Appen; Fast 50 Awards
Appen Holdings was named a winner in the 2014 Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards. See what the awards are and read more.
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7 Advances That Are Pushing the Boundaries of Computer Vision
Before we can think critically about computer vision, we need to take a moment to appreciate our own human vision system. Just think what we have been able to do in our lives as humans with eyeballs! We have analyzed, sorted, made sense of arbitrary objects in arbitrary situations, effortlessly tracked the movement of things, recalled perfect 3D models of ...
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