CrowdFlower becomes Figure Eight for AI trait

San Francisco-based crowdsourcing platform provider for online staffing Crowdflower has rebranded as Figure Eight as it hunts out opportunities in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, reports David Penn at Finovate. Figure Eight CEO Robin Bordoli explains that these changes have included "shifting the company from managed service to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), abstracting sourcing human intelligence from the application of human intelligence, human-in-the-loop and active learning, combining human intelligence and machine learning, and acting as a trusted AI guide for customers just beginning to take advantage of the technology". Bordoli took over as CEO of the company which was led by founder Lukas Biewald until early 2015. The company says it chose the name Figure Eight for a variety of reasons – and in consultation with "one of the top naming agencies in the valley". These reasons varied from the continuous loop shape of the figure eight to the number eight as a reference to a byte, which is a building block of eight bits, to the numerical difference between the atomic numbers for Carbon (6) and Silicon (14).