CrowdFlower Announces Third Wave of "AI for Everyone" Challenge Winners

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 24, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CrowdFlower, the essential human-in-the-loop Artificial Intelligence platform for data science and machine learning teams, today announced the latest winners of its $1 million "AI for Everyone" Challenge. Both sets of winners focused their proposals on creating extensive databases for the human language. One recipient will be focusing on categorizing dimensions and forms of hate speech across the Internet. The other will be working to create a large scale database of the human language, entitled LanguageNet.

The "AI for Everyone" Challenge enables companies, organizations or individuals using AI to solve critical problems in their industry of choice.

"When I first used CrowdFlower as a customer in 2010, it was for disaster response that involved both Human and Machine Intelligence. So, the 'AI for Everyone' winners are working on problems that are very close to my heart," said Robert Munro, CrowdFlower CTO. "The breadth and depth of the researchers collaborating on identifying hate speech is impressive, and it's a delight to support the ambitious LanguageNet database that will help bring AI to more languages."

The first winning proposal from this round has been awarded to a group of academics, professors and Ph.D candidates hailing from elite universities across the world (Cornell University, University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Rochester and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) who came together as a team to submit for the challenge. As a group, they will be working to categorize the different phenomena and forms of hate speech across the Internet.

Currently, hate speech is commonly applied to many different forms of words, phrases, acts and attacks, and its definition leaves much to be specified. With the help of CrowdFlower, the group will help to distinguish and categorize two dimensions of hate speech: Directed/Generalized and Implicit/Explicit. CrowdFlower's AI Human-in-the-loop platform will help to provide detailed labels to a variety of media that the team can use to begin categorizing.

The second winning proposal was submitted by Wei Xu, an assistant professor at Ohio State University, who will be creating LanguageNet - a large scale database for the human language. Wei and her team plan to crowdsource human labels on sentences, through the help of CrowdFlower, and then train deep learning models to identify semantic relations at a large scale. Their work hopes to be comparable and complementary to the ImageNet project led by Feifei Li.

Finalists were selected by a group of distinguished judges including members of CrowdFlower's Scientific Advisory Board: Barney Pell, founder at Moon Express; Pete Warden, Staff Research Engineer at Google; Monica Rogati, independent data science advisor; Adrian Weller, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge; Jack Clark, Director of Strategy and Communications at OpenAI, Adrien Treuille, Vice President of Simulation, Zoox and Lukas Biewald, founder at CrowdFlower. Selection is based on the innovation of the project, its importance to the advancement of AI and the overall potential impact of the proposed initiative.

Applications for the next wave of winners is currently open. Interested parties can apply for the CrowdFlower "AI for Everyone" Challenge before March 14, 2018 at https://www.crowdflower.com/ai-for-everyone/.

To learn more about CrowdFlower visit www.crowdflower.com

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 at the epicenter of today's technology, San Francisco's South of Market (SOMA), 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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