Data Annotation Market sees tremendous growth in the forthcoming future

The global data annotation market was valued at US$ 695.5 million in 2019 and is projected to reach US$ 6.45 billion by 2027, according to ResearchAndMarkets’s report. Expected to grow at a CAGR of 32.54% from 2020 to 2027, the booming data annotation market is witnessing tremendous growth in the forthcoming future.

This is not a surprising trend. The rapid growth of data labeling industry can boil down to the rising integration of machine learning into various industries.

                   (source: statista)

Unlabeled raw data exits around us everywhere, for example, emails, document, photos, presentation videos and speech recordings. The majority of machine learning algorithms today need data labeled so as to learn and train themselves. Data labeling is the process in which annotators manually tag various types of data such as text, video, images, audio through computers or smartphones.Once finished, the manually labeled dataset would be packaged and fed into algorithms for machine learning's model training.

However, data annotation itself is a laborious and time-consuming process. There are two choices to do data labeling projects. One way is to do it in-house, which means the company builds or buys labeling tools and hires an in-house labeling team. The other is to outsource the work to renowned data labeling companies like Appen and LionBridge, who can handle product scale and guarantee quality.

The booming of data annotation market has also stimulated multiple novel players to secure a niche position in the competition. For example, Playment, a data labeling platform for AI, has teamed up with Ouster, a leading LiDAR sensors provider, for annotation and calibration of 3D imagery captured by its sensors in 2018.

ByteBridge.io, a data labeling platform, has innovated the industry through its robust tools for real-time workflow management. On ByteBridge’s platform, developers can define and start the data labeling projects and get the results back instantly. It not only improves the efficiency dramatically but also allows clients to customize their task based on their needs. As a fully-managed platform, it enables developers to manage and monitor the overall data labeling process and provides API for data transfer. The platform also allows users to audit the data quality.

“High-quality data is the fuel that keeps the AI engine running smoothly and the machine learning community can’t get enough of it. The better the annotation, the more accurate the algorithm’s results become. Properly annotating data paves the way for efficient machine learning,” said Brian Cheong, founder and CEO of ByteBridge.io.

Designed to empower AI and ML industry, ByteBridge.io promises to usher in a new era for data labeling and accelerates the advent of the smart AI future.

By Typing Captcha, you are Actually Helping AI’s Training

 Living in the Internet age, how occasionally have you come across the tricky CAPTCHA tests while entering a password or filling a form to prove that you’re fully human? For example, typing the letters and numbers of a warped image, rotating objects to certain angles or moving puzzle pieces into position.

What is CAPTCHA and how does it work?

CAPTCHA is also known as Completely Automated Public Turing Test to filter out the overwhelming armies of spambots. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed CAPTCHA in the early 2000s. Initially, the program displayed some garbled, warped, or distorted text that a computer could not read, but a human can. Users were requested to type the text in a box, and have access to the websites.

The program has achieved wild success. CAPTCHA has grown into a ubiquitous part of the internet user experience. Websites need CAPTCHAs to prevent the “bots” of spammers and other computer underworld types. “Anybody can write a program to sign up for millions of accounts, and the idea was to prevent that,” said Luis von Ahn, a pioneer of early CAPTCHA team and founder of Google’s reCAPTCHA, one of the biggest CAPTCHA services. The little puzzles work because computers are not as good as humans at reading distorted text. Google says that people are solving 200 million CAPTCHAs a day.

Over the past years, Google’s reCAPTCHA button saying “I’m not a robot” was followed more complicated scenarios, such as selecting all the traffic lights, crosswalks, and buses in an image grid. Soon the images have turned increasingly obscured to stay ahead of improving optical character recognition programs in the arms race with bot makers and spammers.

CAPTCHA’s potential influence on AI

While used mostly for security reasons, CAPTCHAs also serve as a benchmark task for artificial intelligence technologies. According to CAPTCHA: using hard AI problems for security by Ahn, Blum and Langford, “any program that has high success over a captcha can be used to solve a hard, unsolved Artificial Intelligence (AI) problem. CAPTCHAs have many applications.”

From 2011, reCAPTCHA has digitized the entire Google Books archive and 13million articles from New York Times catalog, dating back to 1851. After finishing the task, it started to select snippets of photos from Google Street View in 2012. It made users recognize door numbers, other signs and symbols. From 2014, the system started training its Artificial Intelligence (AI) engines.

The warped characters users identify and fill in for reCaptcha are for a bigger purpose, as they have unknowingly transcribed texts for Google. It shows the same content to several users across the world and automatically verifies if a word has been transcribed correctly by comparing the results. Clicks on the blurry images can also help identify objects that computing systems fail to manage, and in this process Internet users are actually sorting and clarifying images to train Google’s AI engine.

Through such mechanisms, Google has been able to help users back in recognizing images, giving better Google search results, and Google Maps result.

ByteBridge: an automated data annotation platform to empower AI

Turing Award winner Yann LeCun once expressed that developers need labeled data to train AI models and more quality-labeled data brings more accurate AI systems from the perspective of business and technology.

In the face of AI blue ocean, a large number of data providers have poured in. ByteBridge.io has made a breakthrough with its automated data labeling platform in order to empower data scientists and AI companies in an effective way.

With a completely automated data service system, ByteBridge.io has developed a mature and transparent workflow. In ByteBridge’s dashboard, developers can create the project by themselves, check the ongoing process simultaneously on a pay-per-task model with clear estimated time and price.

ByteBridge.io thinks highly of application scenarios, such as autonomous driving, retail, agriculture and smart households. It is dedicated to providing the best data solutions for AI development and unleashing the real power of data. “We focus on addressing practical issues in different application scenarios for AI development through one-stop, automated data services. Data labeling industry should take technology-driven tool as core competitiveness,” said Brian Cheong, CEO and founder ByteBridge.io.

As a rare and precious social resource, data needs to be collected, cleaned and labeled before it grows into valuable goods. ByteBridge.io has realized the magic power of data and aimed at providing the best data labeling service to accelerate the development of AI.

How Data Training Accelerates the Implementation of AI into Medical Industry

COVID-19 has undoubtedly accelerated the application of AI in healthcare, such as virus surveillance, diagnosis and patient risk assessments. AI-powered drones, robots and digital assistants are improving healthcare industry with better accuracy and efficiency. These have enabled doctors to provide more effective and personalized treatment with real-time data monitoring and analysis.

Garbage in, garbage out

As one of the most popular and promising subsets of AI, machine learning gives algorithms the ability to "learn" from training data so as to identify patterns and make decisions with little human intervention. However, as the saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out," making sure correct data fed into ML algorithms is not an easy work.

According to a report "the Digital Universe Driving Data Growth in Healthcare," published by EMC with research and analysis from IDC, hospitals are producing 50 petabytes of data per year. Almost 90% of this data consists of medical imaging i.e. digital images from scans like MRIs or CTs. However, more than 97% of this data goes unanalyzed or unused.

Unstructured raw data needs to be labelled for computer visions so that when the data is fed into an algorithm to train a ML model, the algorithm can recognize and learn from it. As DJ Patil and Hilary Mason write in Data Driven, "cleaning and labeling the data is often the most taxing part of data science, and is frequently 80% of the work."

Many enterprises wish to apply AI to their business practices. They have a glut of data, such as vast amounts of images from cameras and document texts. The challenge, however, is how to process and label those data in order to make it useful and productive. Many organizations are struggling to get AI and ML projects into production due to data labeling limitations and real-time validation deficiency.

A robust data labeling platform with real-time monitoring and high efficiency

An entire ecosystem of tech startups has emerged to contribute to the data labelling process. Among them, ByteBridge.io, a data labeling platform, solves the data labeling challenge with robust tools for real-time workflow management and automating the data labeling operations. Aiming at increasing flexibility, quality and efficiency for the data labeling industry, it specializes in high volumes, high variance, complex data, and provides full-stack solution for AI companies.

"On the dashboard, users can seamlessly manage all projects with powerful tools in real-time to meet their unique requirements. The automated platform ensures data quality, reduces the challenge of workforce management and lowers the costs with transparent standardized pricings," said Brian Cheong, CEO and founder of ByteBridge.io.

The quality of labeled dataset determines the success of AI projects, making it vital to look for a reliable platform that can help developers to overcome the data labeling challenges. The demands of data labelling will continue to be on the rise with the development of AI programs.

Human beings benefit from the implementation of AI systems into medical industry: from diagnosis to treatment, from drug experiment to generalization. These are all exciting areas for AI developers. But before that, providing high-quality training data lays the cornerstone of making those progress.

The Human-power Behind AI: Machine Learning Needs Annotators

 “The global data collection and labeling market size was valued at USD 1.0 billion in 2019 and is expected to witness a CAGR of 26.0% from 2020 to 2027,” quote from a market analysis report by grand view research.

At present, the application scenes of artificial intelligence are constantly enriched, and applications are changing our lives by providing automated and smart services. Behind the rapid growth of the AI industry, the new profession of data annotator is also expanding. There is a popular saying in the data annotation industry, “more intelligent, more labors”. The data that AI algorithms learn from must be annotated one by one through the human annotators.

These annotation workers don’t need to leave their homes. They can be trained to categorize and annotate data for machine learning from various platforms, such as cloud factories, label box, and Bytebridge.io, which all allow annotators to work remotely without any location requirement. Through these distributed annotators’ hard work, machines can quickly learn and recognize text, pictures, videos, and other content, and finally become “AI trainers.”

Machine learning requires data annotation

AI data annotators are called “the people behind Artificial Intelligence”. “Data is the blood of AI. It can be said that whoever has mastered the data is very likely to do well,” said Brian Cheong, CEO of bytebridge.io, an automated data labeling platform. He explained that the current Artificial Intelligence could also be called data intelligence because how machine learning evolves depends on the quality and quantity of data. “For example, current face recognition system works well on young and middle-aged group people, because young people are more likely to travel and reside on hotels, so their faces can be more easily collected. On the other hand, there are less data on kids and the elderly.”

But at the same time, data alone is useless. For deep learning, data only make sense when it is tagged and used for machines’ learning and evolution. Labeling is a must.

Starting from the data collection, cleaning, labeling to calibration are 100% relying on annotators. The most basic aspect of data annotation will be the image annotation. For example, if the detection target is a car, the annotator needs to mark all the cars on a picture. If the picture frame does not accurately mark the car, the machine may “break down” due to the inaccuracy. Another example is human posture recognition, which includes 18 key points. Only trained annotators can master these key points, so the annotated data can meet the standard for machines to learn.

“We are proud that we provide various functions in our platform. Many platforms only provide few functions, but we are a one-stop solution for AI firm. Everything can be automated with us,” quote from CEO of bytebridge.io.

Different data types require different skill sets to annotators. In addition to the annotation that is relatively simple and can be mastered by training, some annotation require professional background. For example, for medical data, the annotator needs to do the segmentation of medical images and mark tumor areas, which need to be completed by annotators who have a medical background. Another example is local dialects or foreign languages, these also require annotators who master that language.

“We got the annotators globally, we work with people from developed countries to developing areas, since we provide mobile version labeling toolset, our annotators got a very diversified background, which can meet different tasks’ skill requirements. ”

Now AI has entered the stage of technology application to real-world scenarios, including security, finance, home, transportation, and other major industries. In the future, in the data annotation industry, annotators will also enter the market segment chasing stage along with the AI industry.

How an Automated Data Labeling Platform Accelerates AI industry’s Development During COVID-19

 The impact of AI on COVID-19 has been widely reported across the globe, yet the impact of COVID-19 on AI has not received much attention. As a direct result of Covid-19, AI enterprises are enhancing their strategies for digital transformation and business automation.

Data is the core of any AI/ML development. The quality and depth of data determines the level of AI applications. Considering that the better the data that goes into building the ML training model, the better the output. ML teams need to go through proper data preparation such as data collection, cleansing and labeling.

Data labeling is a simple but difficult task

When it comes to data labeling, the essential step to process raw data (images, text files, videos, etc.) for computer vision so that machine learning models can learn from the labeled dataset, some data labeling companies were forced to move to a work-from-home model due to the pandemic, which has posed challenges in terms of communication, data quality and inspection. For example, Google Cloud has officially announced that its data labeling services are limited or unavailable until further notice. Users can only request data labeling tasks through email but cannot start new data labeling tasks through the Cloud Console, Google Cloud SDK, or the API.

Insiders say that data labeling is a simple but difficult task. On one side, as soon as the labeling standard is set, data labelers just need to follow the rules directly with patience and profession. On the other side, however, data labeling is meant to pursue high quality for ML which demands accuracy, efficiency and high cost of labor and time regarding the massive amount of data to be labeled.

A majority of AI organizations said the process of training AI with data has been more difficult than expected, according to a report released from Alegion. Lack of data and data quality issues become their main obstacles to AI application.

An automated data labeling platform aims to transform the industry

To deal with such issues, Bytebridge.io has launched its automated data labeling platform this year. It aims to provide high quality data with efficiency through a real-time workflow management for AI developers so as to free them from the pressure of data preparation.

An autonomous driving company in Korea needs to label roadblocks and 2D bounding boxes for cars. Considering data security, they have built in-house labeling team. However, they ran into a couple of unexpected problems due to improper labeling tools and low efficiency. Upon trying Bytebridge, their project managers are able to improve working efficiency through Bytebridge’s online real-time monitoring function. The number of monthly labeled images has increased from 600k to 750k and they are able to save 60% of budget.

On Bytebridge’s dashboard, developers can upload raw data and create the labeling projects by themselves. They can check the labeling status and quality anytime, even the estimated price and time required. Such an automated and online platform greatly ensures labeling efficiency and quality. Bytebridge’s easy-to-integrate API enables continuous feeding of high-quality data into machine learning systems. Data can be processed 24/7 by the global contractors, in-house experts and the AI technology.

“We want to create an automated data labeling platform that helps AI/ML companies to accelerate their data project and generate high-quality work,” said Brian Cheong, CEO and founder of Bytebridge.io.

Data are Like Oil or Sunlight. Process it First

 

Data has been compared to a well-known phrase: new oil that business needs to run. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty explains it on the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, “I think the real point to that metaphor,” Rometty said, “is value goes to those that actually refine it, not to those that just hold it.”

Another different view of data came from Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat. “Data is actually more like sunlight than it is like oil because it is actually unlimited,” she said during a panel discussion in Davos. “It can be applied to multiple applications at one time. We keep using it and regenerating.”

An article entitled “Are data more like oil or sunlight?” published in the Economist in February 2020 has highlighted different aspects of data: it is considered as the “most valuable resource” and in the meantime, data can be also a public asset that people should share and make the most use of collectively.

AI is booming yet the data labeling behind is inefficient

Many industries are actively embracing AI to integrate it into their structure transformation. From autonomous driving to drones, from medical systems that assist in diagnosis to digital marketing, AI has empowered more and more areas to be more efficient and intelligent.

Turing Award winner Yann LeCun once expressed that developers need labeled data to train the AI model and more quality labeled data brings more accurate AI systems from the perspective of business and technology. LeCun is one of the godfathers of deep learning and the inventor of convolutional neural networks (CNN), one of the key elements that have spurred a revolution in AI in the past decade.

In the face of AI blue ocean, a large number of data providers have poured in. The data service companies recruit a large amount of data labelers, get them trained on each specific task and distribute the workload to different teams. Or they subcontract the labeling project to smaller data factories that again recruit people to intensively process the divided datasets. The subcontractors or data factories are usually located in India or China due to cheap labor. When the subcontractors complete the first data inspection, they collect the labeled datasets and pass on to the final data service provider who goes through its own data inspection once again and deliver the data results to the AI team.

Complicated, right? Unlike the AI industry, such a traditional working process is inefficient as it takes longer processing time and higher overhead costs, which unfortunately is wasted in secondary and tertiary distribution stages. ML companies are forced to pay high yet the actual small labeling teams could hardly benefit.

ByteBridge: an automated data annotation platform to empower AI

ByteBridge.io has made a breakthrough with its automated data labeling platform in order to empower data scientists and AI companies in an effective and engaged way.

With a completely automated data service system, ByteBridge.io has developed a mature and transparent workflow. In ByteBridge’s dashboard, developers can create the project by themselves, check the ongoing process simultaneously on a pay-per-task model with clear estimated time and price.

ByteBridge.io thinks highly of application scenarios, such as autonomous driving, retail, agriculture and smart households. It is dedicated to providing the best data solutions for AI development and unleashing the most value of data. “We focus on addressing practical issues in different application scenarios for AI development though one-stop, automated data solutions. Data labeling industry should take technology-driven as core competitiveness with efficiency and cost advantage,” said Brian Cheong, CEO and founder ByteBridge.io

It is undeniable that data has become a rare and precious social resource. Whatever metaphors of data are, such as new gold, oil, currency or sunlight, raw data is meaningless at first. It needs to be collected, cleaned and labeled before it grows into valuable goods. ByteBridge.io has realized the magic power of data and aimed at providing the best data labeling service to accelerate the development of AI with accuracy and efficiency.

Better Data for Smarter Chatbots

 Chatbots, computer programs that interact with users through natural language, have become extraordinarily popular due to technological advances. Among various types of chatbots, the need of conversational AI chatbots has become acute in order to facilitate human computer interactions through messaging applications, phones, websites, or mobile apps. In fact, a chatbot is just one of the typical examples of AI systems, many of which are powered by machine learning.

Not-so-intelligent Chatbots

According to a survey by Usabilla in 2019, 54% of respondents said they would prefer a chatbot to a human customer support representative if it saves them 10 minutes. Moreover, 59% of consumers in a PWC survey mentioned they want to have more humanized experiences with chatbots. Although customers have positive feelings toward AI solutions for the efficiency, many not-so-intelligent chatbots which are not smart enough to engage in fundamental conversations are seen in several industries.

Most chatbots that we see today are based on machine learning. They incorporate the ability to understand human language and get themselves trained. With machine learning, the computer systems can learn by being exposed to many examples: the training dataset. The dataset can be thought of as a set of examples. The chatbot’s algorithms extract and save patterns with each input of data. In this way, a chatbot uses training data to understand user behavior and presents the most applicable conversation for a personalized experience.

If not properly considered and developed, chatbots may contain massive potential failures. For example, when a customer starts a conversation with the word “howdy”, if the chatbot only has greeting words “hello”, “hi”programmed in the training dataset, unfortunately it doesn’t have a clue how to respond.

The quality of training data is key

Ben Virdee-Chapman, head of product at Kairos.com, once said that “the quality of the training data that allows algorithms to learn is key.” Preparing the training dataset for chatbots is not easy. For a customer service chatbot, a dataset that contains a massive amount of discussion text between customers and human-based customer support need to be collected, cleaned and labeled to make it understandable for NLP and develop the AI-enabled chatbot so as to communicate with people.

Conversational AI agents such as Alexa and Siri are built with manually annotated data. The accuracy of the ML models can be constantly improved by manually transcribed and annotated data. However, large-scale manual annotation is usually expensive and time-consuming. Thus, abundant and useful datasets are valuable assets for chatbot development.

Manual annotation gives the chatbot a competitive advantage and differentiates it from other competitors. AI and ML companies are seeking high quality datasets to train their algorithms. The choices among different labeling services can make an enormous impact on the quality of the training data, the amount of time and cost required.

Chatbots needs sufficient data to understand human intention. Traditional data providers collect text data or transcribe audio data offline from all available resources and upload the total data onto a certain software, which in turn takes unnecessary communication cost. On the other hand, data quality is often not guaranteed. Thus, obtaining task-oriented text datasets and getting them annotated in a massive amount remains a bottleneck for developers.

ByteBridge.io is one of the leading data service companies that aim to transform the data labeling industry. With a unique and user-friendly platform, Bytebridge.io enables users to complete data labeling tasks online conveniently. Moreover, the blockchain-driven data company substitutes the traditional model with an innovative and precise consensus mechanism, which dramatically improves working efficiency and accuracy.

Partnered with over 30 different language speaking communities across the globe, ByteBridge.io now provides data collection and annotation services covering languages such as English, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Bengali, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Turkish, Arabic, Russian and more. With rich access to contractors worldwide, it ensures training data quality while expanding its service to a wider range of locations. ByteBridge’s high-quality data collecting and labeling service has empowered various industries such as healthcare, retail, robotics and self-driving, making it possible to integrate AI into such fields.

Chatbots are evolving and becoming increasingly sophisticated in an endeavor to mimic how people talk. Good chatbot applications can not only enhance customer experience, but also improve operational efficiency by reducing cost. To be successful, obtaining crucial datasets is valuable in training and optimizing the chatbot system.