CrowdFlower Adds World-Class AI Expertise To Extend Its Category Leadership

SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- CrowdFlower, the essential human-in-the-loop platform for data science and machine learning teams, today announced three new artificial intelligence industry experts – Robert Munro, Monica Rogati, and Adrian Weller – have joined CrowdFlower to help guide the company's future strategy. Robert Munro joins CrowdFlower as VP of Machine Learning where his focus will be helping organizations effectively apply AI to their business.  Monica Rogati and Adrian Weller have joined CrowdFlower's Scientific Advisory Board where their focus will be advising on the developing science of artificial intelligence and providing input to the company's technology and product strategy.

CrowdFlower solves the two biggest barriers to the broad adoption of machine learning by businesses.  The first problem is insufficient training data. Machine learning algorithms have powerful potential just like a five year old child attending kindergarten.  That child has limited effectiveness unless closely supervised in the real world outside the classroom.  CrowdFlower's platform creates high quality large scale customized training data from raw unstructured image or text data that becomes the lesson plan for the model to learn. The second problem is how to gracefully handle the fail states of machine learning models.  CrowdFlower's approach is like the teacher who tests the students so they can focus the learning where the student is failing and not where they are already succeeding.  The machine learning model handles the high confidence cases, and human intelligence is applied to the low confidence cases. This iterative approach allows you to start getting the benefits of machine learning sooner, while continuously improving the performance of the model.

"We are delighted to be able to bring such deep technical AI talent into our company," said Robin Bordoli, CEO at CrowdFlower.  "Robert, Monica and Adrian will help us extend our leadership position in making AI work for businesses large and small.  We are excited to be in a position to help guide our customers on this journey – whether that is through consulting or by helping them build the training data and the machine learning models they need to make the AI implementation work in the real world."

Robert Munro joins CrowdFlower from Amazon where he was Principal Product Manager for Amazon AI products leading the development for their first Natural Language Processing services in the Deep Learning team.  He is an expert in combining Human and Machine Intelligence in the areas of Text, Speech, Image and Video Processing, with experience in founding AI companies and leading Machine Learning teams. He has worked in many diverse environments, from Sierra Leone, Haiti and the Amazon, to London, Sydney and Silicon Valley, in organizations ranging from startups to the United Nations. He has a PhD in computational linguistics from Stanford University, published more than 50 papers, received 10 patents, and is a regular speaker about machine learning and artificial intelligence.

"I am delighted to join CrowdFlower to help enterprises harness the power of AI to transform their business," said Robert Munro, VP Machine Learning at CrowdFlower.  "I've experienced the power of the CrowdFlower platform as a customer so I know first hand how essential it is to making AI work.  I look forward to working with Robin and the executive team to extend our leadership in the nascent but essential category of human-in-the-loop for machine learning."

Monica Rogati is a data science and AI advisor working with dozens of companies, from stealth startups to S&P 500 companies.  Before becoming an independent advisor, she was Jawbone's VP of Data, where she led a team of top data scientists and engineers that developed intelligent data products. Prior to Jawbone, she was one of the early members of the LinkedIn data science team, where she developed some of LinkedIn's key data products for matching jobs to passive candidates, discovering people you may know, and recommending groups you may like.  She has a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon with a focus on applied machine learning and was named a Big Data All-Star by Fortune Magazine.

Adrian Weller is a senior research fellow in the Machine Learning Group at the University of Cambridge. His current research focus is on scalable, reliable, interpretable and fair algorithms. He is also an executive fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence where he leads their project on Trust and Transparency, and a faculty fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for data science where he leads their project on fairness, transparency and privacy. He is broadly interested in artificial intelligence, its commercial applications and its societal implications. He has a PhD in computer science from Columbia University and an MA in mathematics from Cambridge.

About CrowdFlower
CrowdFlower is the essential human-in-the-loop AI platform for data science and machine learning teams. The CrowdFlower software platform trains, tests, and tunes machine learning models to make AI work in the real world. CrowdFlower's technology and expertise supports a wide range of use cases including autonomous vehicles, intelligent personal assistants, medical image labeling, consumer product identification, content categorization, customer support ticket classification, social data insight, CRM data enrichment, product categorization, and search relevance.

Headquartered in the Mission District in San Francisco and backed by Canvas Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Industry Ventures, Microsoft Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, CrowdFlower serves Fortune 500 and fast-growing data-driven organizations across a wide variety of industries. For more information, visit www.crowdflower.com.

SOURCE CrowdFlower

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