Data Annotation: The Billion Dollar Business Behind AI Breakthroughs

When Lei Wang became a data annotator two years ago her job was fairly simple: Identifying people's gender in images. But since then Wang has noticed increasing complexity in the tasks she is assigned: from labeling gender to labeling age, from framing 2D objects to 3D bounding boxes, from daylight images to late night and foggy scenes, and the list goes on. Wang is 25 years old. She used to be a receptionist, but when her company shut down in 2017 an algorithm engineer friend suggested she explore a new career path in data annotation -- the essential process of labeling data to make it usable for artificial intelligence systems, particularly those using supervised machine learning. Being out of a job, she decided to give it a try.