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You don’t need advanced intelligence to find meaning in the ever evolving world of data for the AI lifecycle. You just need the right partner. With technology bringing us closer together, we aim to show the value ethical data can have in creating the future we want, today.
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The Impending Data Crisis in the AI Economy
Data is the lifeblood of artificial intelligence. It plays a central role in the development and efficacy of AI systems, fueling their ability to learn, adapt, and make informed decisions. However, the availability of natural data, which is crucial for AI systems to improve, is becoming increasingly limited. Natural data refers to information derived from the real-world environment and is ...
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Deciphering AI from Human Generated Text: The Behavioral Approach
One of the most important elements of building a well-functioning AI model is consistent human feedback. When generative AI models are trained by human annotators, they serve as more effective tools for the end user, which in turn helps drive progress towards a brighter future. The more behavioral signals we can measure, the higher the chance we have of creating quality ...
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Building AI We Can Trust
Today, President Biden issued a landmark Executive Order to ensure the rapid innovation in AI is executed responsibly, safely, and in a human-centric way. It is vital that AI is developed and deployed in a trustworthy and responsible way for all users, which we believe will be supported by the frameworks and core principles of the Executive Order. At Appen, ...
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Appen and the UNGC: Defining Sustainability and Ethics in the AI Era
In January 2023, Appen signed the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), joining more than 23,000 companies that have committed to supporting sustainable business practices and to taking ownership of creating a brighter, more just society. In our rapidly evolving world, it’s never been more important for businesses to operate within a strong, shared system of values — and that’s exactly ...
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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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