Self-driving car technology is fueling disruptive change in the automotive industry. At Samasource, we are excited about this prospect and about its potential to have a much wider societal impact by outsourcing the data-related work to vulnerable communities worldwide.
The mother of all artificial intelligence projects
Apple chief executive Tim Cook rightly described the challenge of building autonomous vehicles as “the mother of all artificial intelligence projects” earlier this year. Given the challenges to be solved to make autonomous vehicles a reality, cracking the complex code will likely fuel use cases in other industries.
Only with recently developed methods of algorithm creation, such as machine learning and deep learning, is it becoming a possibility to create algorithms for the complex scenarios involved in autonomous vehicles.
Affecting a huge percentage of people
Our Vice President of EMEA and APAC, Houk Nolten, explains, “Autonomous vehicle technology represents an implementation of artificial intelligence that will affect a huge percentage of people on the planet in some form. For anyone who interacts with cars today, it is highly possible that they’ll be interacting with autonomous vehicles in the not-so-distant future. It creates great economic potential in many ways.”
He adds, “The most successful type of algorithm to create object detection models for autonomous vehicles has come from supervised deep learning algorithms. These rely on a high amount of precisely annotated data in order to be successful.” This is where Samasource enters the equation.
Samasource has been a trusted partner for the creation and annotation of high-quality training data across industries. We are working on computer vision and natural language processing for applications such as self-driving cars, facial recognition, satellite image analysis, chatbots, and everything in between. Our unique model generates high-quality data against low costs, while having a social impact in vulnerable communities.
Driving social impact
“At Samasource, we intentionally seek people that are living below the poverty line in their host country to do digital tasks like image tagging for self-driving cars. We recruit them at local training centers, taking advantage of the new connectivity across Africa and the massive untapped human potential,” Daniele explains.
He adds, “We call it ‘impact sourcing’, which is centered on the idea that sourcing from poor communities can drive the biggest social impact. Since we started ten years ago, we’ve done work for hundreds of companies. A lot of our work happens in large delivery centers in Nairobi. Hence, we’re confident to say that the software brains of tomorrow’s self-driving cars are being trained with African data.”
At Samasource, we believe that the annotated data that is needed to make autonomous vehicles a success can and should be generated in vulnerable communities around the world. In this way, the disruptive technological development will have an important social impact. We look forward to opening up the creation of high-quality training data to people that are living below the poverty line and are passionate about contributing to this important societal side effect.
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