Appen Founders Nominated For 2018 Innovation Award

By Appen. November 06, 2018

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! The program seeks to recognize companies that are, according to GQ Australia, “making a great impact within their field of speciality.” Appen was founded in Sydney in 1996 by linguist Dr. Julie Vonwiller, later joined by her engineer husband, Chris Vonwiller. Motivated by their passion for language and technology, the Vonwillers saw an opportunity to develop linguistic technologies to support product innovation in new markets around the world. In 2011, Appen merged with the Butler Hill Group, which was based in Ridgefield, Connecticut and Seattle, Washington, and founded by Lisa Braden-Harder in 1993. Lisa was a member of the pioneering team in grammar-checking technology at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center before she started a linguistic consulting practice. After the merger, the combined business became Appen Butler Hill and expanded its business scope to include other services to support the rapidly growing machine learning market. In 2017, Appen acquired Leapforce, a leading provider of search relevance services, to enable greater participation in the dynamic and high-growth artificial intelligence market. Now over 20 years later, Appen has grown to over 350 employees and a crowd of over 1 million flexible workers, providing high-quality training data sets for machine learning-based solutions built by leading firms worldwide, across multiple industries. We have been recognized through a variety of leading awards programs. We have also created strong customer relationships over the years. Clients continue to renew with Appen as a result of our domain expertise, commitment to high levels of customer service, and the high quality of our training data. According to Jack Elliot, Chief Data Scientist at FlamingoAI, “It’s an all-out capability thing. You can’t be a machine learning firm that develops core IP and sources data the way Appen does.”

Appen Founders The VonWillers

Please vote! Voting for the 2018 Innovation Awards is open now through November 7. We appreciate your support! Vote for Chris and Julie Vonwiller here.

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