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SLAM for efficient Lidar Labeling

As the autonomous driving industry continuously evolves and 3D computer vision undergoes rapid development, the need for accurate and efficiently-annotated 3D data is on the rise. A key technology we have applied at Sama to this end is Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM).

New report: The latest trends and challenges in machine learning

Machine learning is rapidly evolving, but there are still challenges and uncertainties that need to be addressed for it to reach its full potential. To understand the concerns, motivations and opinions of ML professionals, Sama conducted our 2023 ML Pulse survey. Here's what we heard about the hype surrounding Generative AI, the confusion around success ... Read more

Sama is a TITAN and Globee Women in Business Awards Winner

Sama, a leading provider of data annotation and model validation solutions, has unveiled its cutting-edge solution: Sama GenAI. This specialized solution has already empowered some of the most advanced Generative AI (GenAI) and foundation models globally.

Sama staff smile back at you from our bright green booth at ICCV 2023

ICCV 2023: 5 sessions and a dataset we’re still thinking about

Sama staff attended ICCV 2023, and gained valuable insights, traded ideas, and made connections with like-minded individuals who are shaping the future of ML, AI, and CV. The sense of community and collaboration among such passionate individuals was energizing and made our experience all the more memorable.

Accelerating AI Innovation: Sama Introduces Sama GenAI for Faster, High-Performance Model Development

Sama, a leading provider of data annotation and model validation solutions, has unveiled its cutting-edge solution: Sama GenAI. This specialized solution has already empowered some of the most advanced Generative AI (GenAI) and foundation models globally.

Understanding Keypoint Annotation: A Guide to Enhancing AI’s Vision

This exploration will guide you toward comprehending the pivotal role keypoint annotation plays in enhancing AI’s visual understanding, and how to use it.

The Ripple Effect: A Story of Community Impact

Communities are the backbone of our society. It is our responsibility to ensure their wellbeing. Sama’s contribution to various communities across the world is a reflection of our understanding of this.

High-Quality Labels Power Accurate Search for Walmart’s 385 Million Online Visitors

When Walmart set out to improve e-commerce search relevance, it needed a labeling partner who could scale with demand without sacrificing quality.

Crowdsourcing Data Annotation: Benefits & Risks

Crowdsourced data annotation is the process of obtaining labeled data by outsourcing the annotation task to a large group of contributors, usually through a crowdsourcing platform.

Sama Launches Re-Engineered Data Annotation Platform, Delivering 99% Client Acceptance Rate for AI Training Data

Platform 2.0, which consists of SamaIQ™, SamaAssure™ and SamaHub™, is a powerful ally of ML models, offering not only high-quality annotated data and model validation, but a unique blend of cutting-edge technology, proprietary approaches and human expertise.

Crop health monitoring computer vision for agriculture

Top 4 Computer Vision Applications in Agriculture

Agriculture is transforming as new, advanced technologies are used in everyday activities. One of the most far-reaching developments is the use of computer vision, which is revolutionizing farming practices and driving sustainable agriculture forward.

Sama’s 2022 Impact Report: Supporting our People, the Planet, and Responsible AI

This is the first comprehensive report on Sama’s impact since we transitioned to a private entity in 2018. It is also the first report in our 15 year history

Sama Calls for the EU to Pass the EU AI Act Now (Wherever you are)

The European Union (EU) is leading the way in terms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) legislation. We strongly support the EU approach and believe that it can have a positive impact on the responsible and ethical development of AI

Computer vision applications 2023

3 Hidden Costs of Data Annotation

In our latest webinar, Identifying the Hidden Costs of Data Annotation, Megan McNeil and Ryan Tavakolfar explore the key factors that can impact the efficiency and quality of data annotation and how they interplay with each other.

retail-ai-application

3 Tips to Avoid Machine Learning Biases in Retail Industry

Model biases in retail can have broader societal impacts, contributing to inequalities and reinforcing systemic biases. Credit scoring algorithms are often used by banks and other financial institutions to evaluate loan applications.

augmented reality in ecommerce

What Nike’s Use of AR in E-commerce Means for the Retail Industry

From improved shopping experiences to increased buyer’s confidence, here’s what Nike’s use of AR in e-commerce means for the retail industry.

How to Select Image Annotation Tools & Techniques

Selecting the proper image annotation technique is critical to machine learning (ML) performance because the accuracy and efficiency of computer vision applications depend heavily on the quality and consistency of the annotations.

Segment Anything: Is SAM all you need?

Recently, Meta AI’s release of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has sparked a lot of interest and excitement in the Computer Vision (CV) community. SAM is an image segmentation model that can provide segmentation masks for a variety of input prompts,

retail-ai-application

5 Computer Vision Applications in Retail in 2023

Retailers are using AI-powered tools and applications to personalize product recommendations, manage inventory levels, provide customer service, enable virtual shopping experiences, and detect fraudulent activities.

Top 3 Examples of How Poor Data Quality Impacts ML

If a machine learning model is trained on inaccurate or missing data, it may falsely classify images or make incorrect recommendations. Missing data can negatively impact machine learning models by reducing accuracy or introducing bias.

Sama’s Response to Today’s Events

Nairobi, Kenya, May 5, 2023- Sama respects the right to peacefully demonstrate. In the interest of safety, other tenants at Sameer Business Park requested property management to engage the police.

Autonomous vehicles AI

How to Optimize Data Quality for Better ML Model Performance

One of the main reasons for this is the lack of reliable scaling of data annotation volumes and quality, which is often fueled by human error, unclear assumptions, ambiguity of images, and the subjective nature of the annotation task.

A New Milestone in Sama’s Climate Action Journey: Setting Carbon Reduction Targets

Sama is excited to announce that we have reached a key milestone in our climate action journey: setting science-based carbon reduction targets to achieve by 2030.

video annotators

Top 5 Mistakes in Video Annotation Projects

Video annotation is a critical process for machine learning applications such as object detection, action recognition, and speech recognition.

virtual-reality-image-annotation-use-case

Trending Image Annotation Use Cases in 2023

Image annotation is a powerful tool that can help improve the accuracy and efficiency of applications, from object detection and recognition to image search and classification.

Sama Calls for Canada’s AIDA Regulation to Cover the Entire AI Supply Chain

Sama believes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a force for good in the world with appropriate safeguards guiding the responsible and ethical development of AI.

iot smart retail use computer vision,

Top 5 Computer Vision Applications in 2023

Computer vision has a wide range of applications. This can be object recognition and tracking, such as in security systems, retail, and manufacturing to track and identify objects.

Data Annotation Benefits and Advantages in 2023

Discontinuing the content moderation business was a difficult decision that we made when Sama shifted its focus to computer vision data annotation technology platform and solutions.

What is object tracking and how is it used?

There are two primary kinds of object tracking that serve different kinds of applications. First, image tracking is the process of isolating objects in an image and tracking them. For instance, real estate agents might use this in interior design software.

Sama March Update

Discontinuing the content moderation business was a difficult decision that we made when Sama shifted its focus to computer vision data annotation technology platform and solutions.

Computer Vision : History & How it Works

Computer vision helps increase automation and improves the ability to analyze and interpret visual data at a scale. It has several stages, including image acquisition, and processing, feature extraction, and pattern recognition.

Making Autonomous Vehicles Savvier and Safer with Deep Learning

As autonomous vehicle adoption grows, the most intelligent among them are gathering data from their computer vision cameras,LiDAR lasers, and arrays of onboard sensors.

5 Things We’ve Learned About Bridging the Gender Gap

Dr. Borne shares the history of data collection and analysis in astronomy and the evolution of cookies on the internet and explains the concept of Web3 and the future of data ownership

Lyft: How Autonomous, Electric, & Shared Vehicles are the future

Lyft’s Sarah Barnes describes how citydwellers of the near future will have to rely on Autonomous, Connected, Electric and Shared transport.

New Ebook: How to Get Quality Ground Truth Labels for All Autonomous Driving Applications – Without Busting the Bank

In this ebook, Sama provides a practical guide to getting optimal quality ground truth labels for your autonomous driving project!

Our Vision is Computer Vision

Like many companies across the world, Sama is navigating a shifting economy with an eye for long-term sustainability.

data-annotation-challenge-retail

The State of Data Annotation in Computer Vision

The challenges of data annotation are far-reaching for companies in retail, media, consumer goods, transportation and e-commerce, and many others. To overcome the challenges, these companies need to train their AI algorithms to

video annotators

In-House vs Outsourcing Data Annotation for ML: Pros & Cons

In-house data annotation can be expensive but can be helpful in early stages of ML production. Outsourcing data annotation is cheaper but security can be compromised.

Data-Driven AI for Good with Neil Sahota from IBM and the UN

IBM is recognized as an industry leader in the data, analytics, ML, and AI sectors. Yet on Jeopardy several years ago, Watson gave puzzling and incorrect responses to trivia questions. It won the tournament, yet reinforced challenges many organizations have experienced with their AI initiatives.

sama-coco-dataset

Treat not a trick – the brand new Sama-Coco dataset

We’re proud to release the Sama-Coco dataset, a relabeling of Coco-2017. It’s free and ungated for any machine engineers to use in their projects. Happy Halloween!

Navigating AI Liability Compliance – how Sama helps

This article is the first in a series regarding how Sama uniquely equips its clients with a data labeling process that complies with the emerging body of AI regulation to ultimately avoid liability risks and costly rework. NTD: worth going into the importance of Digital Trust?

What is Data Curation and Do I Need It?

Data curation tools help prioritize labels that will have the greatest impact on your models, quickly optimizing model accuracy while saving time & money.

Why Human-in-the-Loop Data Validation Will Improve Your Models

As a data scientist, you may be familiar with the following scenario: your model performed well in training, but it’s producing less-than-desirable results when faced with new data in production.

Single Object Tracking: Key Machine Learning Concepts, Models, and Techniques

What helps self-driving cars “see”? At their core, autonomous vehicle perception systems rely on object tracking algorithms to help understand their surroundings and ensure optimal safety.

Sama Makes Organizational Changes

Like many companies across the world, Sama is navigating a shifting economy with an eye for long-term sustainability.

New Ebook: 12 Frequently Asked Data Annotation Challenges for Retail

In this ebook, Sama answers data labeling FAQs such as “How much data do I need?”, “Which parts of my data should I annotate first?” and many more.

Sama Made the Inc. 5000 List… For the Third Year in a Row!

Sama is honored to have made the Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies… for the third year in a row. Being included on the Inc. 5000 list is a direct reflection of the hard work, dedication, and resiliency of our talented teams.

It’s Time to Redefine Data Quality for Machine Learning

In ML, 100% data quality isn’t necessary – it isn’t even feasible. Learn how to find the quality “sweet spot” to get your models performing as desired.

Overcoming Data Labeling Challenges for Smart Checkout

More shopping doesn’t need to lead to longer lines. Many retailers have implemented self-checkout lines to help shoppers get their errands done more quickly.

ML Object Tracking for Video Annotation: Greater Throughput, Zero Sacrifice

Sama is investing in ML-powered tools to optimize efficiency for your video annotation projects; introducing ML object tracking to increase throughput without sacrificing quality.

New from Sama: Faster, More Cost-Effective Drivable Area Annotation for 3D Point Cloud Data

Sama is thrilled to announce new and improved features for 3D point cloud annotation to provide our clients with the most secure, cost-effective, and fastest path to quality 3D drivable area annotation at scale.

virtual-try-on-fiiting-rooms

Virtual Fitting Rooms: Solving Data Labeling Challenges for Fashion and Footwear

Many online shopping experiences end in disappointment. In 2020, $102 billion worth of products purchased online were returned to retailers — about 18% of all online sales.

ensuring-data-quality-autonomous-vehicles

Defining, Measuring, and Guaranteeing Quality for Autonomous Driving

Good annotation and testing practices are the foundations of building a great model. However, understanding what constitutes quality data is a tricky question.

Sama’s Contribution to Advancing AI Recognized

Almost 15 years ago, Leila Janah founded Sama on the belief that ​​“talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not.” Her vision — to give work, not aid — has since produced ripple effects throughout East Africa and the world.

Data Labeling Smart Homes

Accurate Data Labeling Makes Your Smart Homes Smarter

Smart homes and appliances empower homeowners to remotely control and program appliances. They wouldn’t be so “smart” without high-quality labeled data.

customer-shopping

4 Game-Changing Applications of LiDAR in Retail

Customers walk around stores, browse displays, walk down aisles, and stop to consider products. From the outside, it may not appear there is much to glean from these behaviors.

Data Curation Capabilities and Enhanced 3D & LiDAR Annotation Features

Today, Sama is thrilled to announce a host of new offerings which will allow us to continue to power our customers’ ML models with unmatched accuracy, scale, and efficiency.

Hitting Revenues Out of the Park with Accurate Data for Sports Analytics

In sports, AI can drive ticket and merchandise sales by studying purchase patterns from a large number of fans. AI is used in sports both on and off-pitch.

10 Frequently Asked Data Labeling Questions

Here are some of the most frequently asked data labeling questions, along with recommendations for approaching your data annotation strategy holistically.

Building a Robust Automotive LiDAR Annotation Quality Rubric

The purpose of a LiDAR annotation quality rubric is simple: it ensures that two people will score the same object in identical ways.

A Message From Our CEO

“Like so many immigrant children, I learned to believe in a dream that is as much American as it is universal: a dream of equal opportunity.” – Leila Janah

Sama and Content Moderation: What You Need to Know

Continuous improvement and excellence are at the heart of everything we do, and we invite anyone, in and outside of the company, to help us on our journey.

Sama by the Numbers

Sama is committed to providing our workforce with professional development and upskilling opportunities, benefits, and a living wage.

Orbisk is Using Accurate AI to Help Restaurants Reduce Food Waste Up to 70%

Orbisk is focused on limiting the amount of food waste produced in restaurants, hotels, and cafes with their AI-powered food waste monitoring solution.

Sama’s Experiment-Driven Approach to Solving for High-Quality Labels at Scale

A recent academic paper outlines how Sama uses Experiment-Driven Development to measure how improvements made to our platform increase annotation efficiency.

Swift Medical is Reimagining Patient Care with AI-Powered Wound Monitoring

Swift partnered with Sama to cost-effectively scale data annotations for their CV model, without compromising the clinician-level accuracy they needed.

Sama Partners with Mila to Solve Key Problems in AI Development

Sama is thrilled to partner with research center Mila, to help further the mission of creating innovative technologies to drive the AI industry forward.

Orbisk’s Sama-Powered Food Waste Solution Named to Fast Company’s First-Ever List of the Next Big Things in Tech

Sama has been recognized in Fast Company’s list of the Next Big Things in Tech for our work with our partners at Orbisk.

Accurate Data Labeling Powers the Volumental Shoe Recommendation App — Helping Retailers Convert Mobile Customers

Learn how Volumental partnered with Sama to accurately label the datasets that fuel the computer vision technology for their mobile foot scanning app.

Getting to Series B: How Sama is Proving Impact is a Strategy for Business Success

Last week, Sama secured Series B, cementing the viability of purpose-driven companies—and hopefully inspiring others to pursue purpose and profitability.

Sama Raises $70M Series B to Build a More Accurate, More Ethical, End-to-End AI Development Pipeline

Sama has raised $70M Series B funding to build the first end-to-end AI platform that enables teams to manage the complete AI lifecycle.

How More Accurate Data Labeling is Helping PolyPerception Advocate for Responsible Waste Management

Find out how accurately labeled data is helping PolyPerception provide material recovery facilities with better visibility into their waste streams.

ML Assisted Annotation Powered by MICROMODEL Technology

ML Assisted Annotation can help you generate high-quality pre-labeled and human-assisted annotations, for predictably higher quality data in half the time.

New White Paper by Partnership on AI: Responsible Sourcing of Data Enrichment Services

This whitepaper by Partnership on AI examines the working conditions of data enrichment professionals, and what can be done to improve them.

How Sama’s Accurate AI is Helping Blind Runners Run Independently

Project Guideline by Google partnered with Sama to help people who are blind run without a guide, using only a smartphone, headphones, and a yellow guideline.

Innovation Week: How Sama Builds a Culture of Experimentation

Sama’s third annual Innovation Week is coming to a close, and once more, our teams have given us plenty to be excited about.

RCT Results from MIT: Evaluating the Impact of Sama’s Training and Job Programs

This week, researchers at MIT released a white paper evaluating Sama’s impact through a three-year Randomized Controlled Trial study. Here are their findings.

How Sama Powers Tribe Dynamics to Measure Your Influencer Marketing Efforts

Tribe Dynamics helps customers get better ROI from influencer programs. Find out how partnering with Sama helped Tribe better serve clients and expand into new markets.

Challenges & Solutions for 3D LiDAR Annotation & 3D Data Sets

In this webinar, discover the challenges & solutions to 3D LiDAR annotation & 3D data sets for solving autonomous driving or driver assistance.

Experts Explain: How to Think About Human-Centered Machine Learning

We asked experts working in the field about their thoughts on the role of humans in Machine Learning, and humans and the future of ML. 

How to Define and Measure Your Training Data Quality

How do you define training data quality and measure it? How do you improve it? We go into defining, measuring, and reviewing your training data quality.

10 Experts on the Biggest Roadblocks to Bringing ML Models to Production

87% of AI projects will never make it into production. Why? We asked ML experts.

Sama’s Gold Tasks: ML Training Data with Gold-Standard Quality

Sama is an expert in efficiently designing annotation guidelines that enhance data quality. Gold Tasks refer to tasks that have been annotated perfectly.

Part 3: A/B Testing with Python

In this series of three we’ll go into Experiment Driven Development and A/B Testing. EDD is fact-based development: based on evidence, not intuition.

Supercharge Your Data Quality with Automated Quality Accelerators

Automated quality accelerators are technology innovations that are focused on reducing the amount of manual quality assurance time spent in QA processes.

Part 2: A/B Testing

In this series of three we’ll go into Experiment Driven Development and A/B Testing. EDD is fact-based development: based on evidence, not intuition.

Part 1: Experiment Driven Development

In this series of three we’ll go into Experiment Driven Development. EDD is fact-based development: based on evidence, not intuition.

10 Experts Give Reasons Why High-Quality Training Data is so Important

We reached out to various ML experts, asking them the questions: Why is high-quality training data so important? Why do so many projects fail in ML?

Factotum: Containerizing DevOps Tools for Cloud Native Engineering and CI/CD

Introducing Factotum: an MIT-licensed, open source, kubernetes-oriented, general purpose docker container for devs/devops and custom CI/CD pipelines.

What’s next? 17 Machine Learning Predictions for 2021

2021 Predictions: We asked a range of ML experts about what they believe will be the next big thing in AI and Machine Learning.

The Sama MLOps Pipeline: Automating Model Training on the Cloud

The Sama MLOps Pipeline: At Sama we decided to build our own automated training pipeline in order to limit costs, and to avoid tying ourselves to a particular cloud provider. 

We Are Now Sama: Accurate Data For Ambitious AI

Samasource is now Sama, the same team that powers the world’s most ambitious AI projects with high-quality and accurate data, but with a new name that represents our vision moving forward.

10 Must-Read Machine Learning Books

There’s no shortage of literature about ML, but we’ve compiled a list of 10 must-read books to add to your list!

Fast Vector Annotation with Machine Learning Assisted Annotation

In this article we summarize an approach that we have developed to speed up polygonal instance segmentation using machine learning.

Meet Our New CEO: Wendy Gonzalez

Sama is thrilled to announce that Wendy Gonzalez is our new Chief Executive Officer.

Custom Keypoint Shapes for Vector Image & Video Annotation

Announcing our support for custom keypoint shapes in our training data platform trusted by the world’s leading AI teams, for vector image and video annotation.

12 Women in Machine Learning to Watch

Here’s a celebratory list of some of the women we look up to and have spearheaded development in AI and Machine Learning in 2020.

Code.Jam(2020)-McGill Hackathon: and the winner is A Virtual Fitting Room

For the second consecutive year, Sama was a Terabyte partner of the McGill Engineering Hackathon, the largest annual hackathon run by the McGill Electrical, Computer, and Software Engineering Student Society.

From Dreams to Reality: Our Journey to Becoming a Certified B Corporation

We’re humbled and honored to announce that, as of today, Sama is the first AI company to receive the prestigious B Corp certification.

5 Examples of AI You Didn’t Know You Used

AI is often framed as something that’ll change our future, but many people aren’t aware of quite the extent to which AI currently used in society and everyday life.

Sama Wins 2020 Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough Award for Best Image Processing Solution

Through our work with Vulcan, we have been awarded the winner of the 2020 AI Breakthrough Awards for the Best Image Processing Solution. 

We made the Inc. 5000 list!

Sama is honored on Inc. Magazine’s Annual List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies—the Inc. 5000

The Training Data Challenge: 5 AI Fails

From accidental Alexa purchasing to bias in recruitment, we have gathered 5 AI fails from the last few years.

“Samasource Opens Kampala”

Underscoring Our Commitment to Racial Justice and Equality

We’ve decided to take action both inside our organization and in partnership with local organizations to drive toward a more equitable society.

Data Protection and Privacy for Training Data

The growth of popularity in AI has been mirrored by a growing number of concerns surrounding privacy, security and ethical use of data.

Introducing Chloe: A ChatBot to Help You Get Accurate Health Information During COVID-19

We’re excited to introduce Chloe, an automated public chatbot service to support in the fight against the coronavirus.

Fast Company Names Sama a 2020 World Changing Ideas Finalist in AI and Data

Fast Company has recognized Sama as a finalist in the AI and Data category as part of their 2020 World Changing Ideas Awards.

traffic light

The Traffic Light Problem for Autonomous Vehicles

The traffic light problem for autonomous vehicles is critical for all vehicle safety, and unlike human-drivers, AVs rely solely on computer vision systems to navigate the world around us.

Celebrating 50 Years of Earth Day: Honoring Leila Janah’s Legacy

Creating lasting social impact, understanding our carbon footprint and being environmentally sustainable are just few of our goals for sustainability and impact.

Object Tracking with Frame Level-Labeling

Sama video and 3D object tracking with frame-level labeling assists companies in quickly building models that better reflect real-world behavior.

Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe: Announcing the PII Data Anonymizer

Sama is excited to launch the PII Data Anonymizer for video training data. This technology enables obscuring of sensitive information in training data.

How Sama is Closing the Gender Pay Gap for Women in the AI Supply Chain

Sama’s commitment to an ethical AI supply chain enables us to close the gender pay gap, by paying a living wage to all of our employees. 

video annotators

4 Ways AI Makes a Positive Impact on Communities in East Africa

As AI adoption expands, untapped communities are finding work at the cutting edge of AI. Here are 4 ways AI makes a positive impact on communities in East Africa.

Fighting AI Bias by Obtaining High-Quality Training Data

During the REWORK Deep Learning Summit, Sama shared how top organizations obtain secure, high-quality training data, fighting AI bias in the process.

8 Answers to Your Questions About AI and Machine Learning

In this interview, we chat with Head of AI at Sama about AI trends to expect in 2020, as well as frequently asked questions about AI and machine learning.

Highlights from McGill CodeJam 2019

Sama was proud to sponsor CodeJam 2019, an annual hackathon at McGill University, from November 15 – 17, 2019.

4 Compelling Reasons to Use AI in E-commerce

When we work with companies that want to use AI in e-commerce, we notice a few common barriers in AI adoption. Here are 4 reasons e-commerce needs AI to stay ahead.

3 Takeaways from ICCV 2019

ICCV 2019 provided a welcoming platform for the distribution and discussion of scholarly and technical work in computer vision.