Ever wonder how video games know what you’re going to do, or how virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa understand your speech? This magic occurs because of something called “Data Annotation”.
This begs the question: What is data annotation, and are these newfangled companies selling this ‘data annotation tech’ even legit? Come on, let’s dig in and find out all about it!
What is Data Annotation?
But before we explore if data annotation tech is real or not, let’s understand what it is. For example, you have a photo of a cat If you were to put a box around the cat and say “This is a cat” then what you are doing would be called annotation.
In more straightforward terms, it is people labelling in pictures videos or texts called data annotations. These tags aid computers in knowing what objects are. Therefore, the next time the computer sees a cat image or picture of a particular object it knows that is a cat.
What Is Data Annotation Used For?
So now I ask, why should we ever have to label things for a computer? Computers are smart, but they can’t visually see how we think. They need just a lot of examples to imbibe.
In the same way, you could imagine that if you had never seen a cat before–you would need to see maybe three or four cats to understand what a picture of a cat looks like, but then after seeing many example pictures with labels read “cat”, now when someone shows me an image and tells I already know what this is.
Then computers also need lots & lots of labelled images. The idea of supervised learning makes sense for most real-world problems where we humans expect our systems/computers/programs/models/algorithms etc.
Predict something more than they should not be expected as original thinking- machines. They learn with the help of these labelled examples using data annotation.
Data Annotation Tech review
This brings me to the question of What is this data annotation tech all about? Yes, it is legit! Data annotation is a needed step in the journey of Artificial Intelligence.
Without this, a self-driving car would not be able to recognise when it has gotten to the red light even though voice assistants will have no technique for colouring your best song.
The tech is used to train systems by many large companies, including Google, Facebook and Amazon. Use data annotation on the world’s best companies to ensure that their technology works well and is safe.
If you have heard of annotation before, it might be through the practical example explained succinctly in every deep-learning course that involves autonomous vehicles & self-driving cars like knowing which stop sign and pedestrian from the picture below to drive safely.
Some ways by which data annotation works are as follows :
Before we go let’s discuss how Data annotation works: It is the equivalent of trying to learn a new video game. In the beginning, you will have no idea what each button is for However after a few minutes of play you learn what each button does. Data annotation is essentially someone telling you what buttons to press so that you can win the game.
Data Annotations can be done in various ways:
Labelling objects in an Image annotation For instance, the box that you draw around a dog in an image and label it as “dog.”
- Word Highlight: Words selected from a sentence. For instance, in the sentence “The cat is on the mat,” you can identify that there exists an animal followed by a location indicated with another object.
- Audio Annotations: Identifying parts of a recording that contains audio. For example, if you had a recording of someone saying hello well that is the greeting.
The computer is then given annotated data. Then, the computer uses it as a training set to learn. The smarter it gets, the more data.
Use Cases of Data Annotation
set of cool and interesting things which can be done using data annotation! Here are some examples:
- Self-driving cars: Using data annotation to detect traffic signs, people and other vehicles in self-driving cars. This guides them to safely operate on the road.
- Health Care: Doctors use annotation to teach a computer how to read an X-ray and find someone who is sick. That makes it more likely that the disease will be diagnosed and treated in its early stages when intervention is most effective.
- Social Media: I am sure that many a time all of you have witnessed how the videos we like reflect on our apps such as Instagram, and TikTok. Data annotation is their way to tag and label what you like watching or the type of stuff they can show you.
Is Data Annotation Safe?
So many of you are getting the question, ” How data annotation is secure?” Yes, it is! In the case of being done right, data annotation is an ethical and secure procedure.
However, companies must respect individual privacy whilst maintaining the responsible use of this data. Have Permission to Use Data When Using Pictures of People, Photos, or Videos
Who Does Data Annotation?
These People Are Responsible For Data Annotation A lot of people work as data annotators. These are the people who annotate data for computers to learn. Companies often use specialized software that makes the process faster Or, actual humans sit and mark this data.
IT people with an eye for detail might enjoy the job of data annotation. It also is the important work of making our daily use technologies better!
The Future of Data Annotation
However, matching-teach architecture works best in such scenarios where only relatively small datasets are available at hand for the given classification or regression problem.
One day we could see even cooler things that data annotation makes us possible like cleaning robots and virtual games just like our lives!
Data annotation will become significantly more sophisticated as well, providing better tools and techniques to help speed the process up while also making it far more accurate. This will just make computers learn better, and our technology will have a lot more intelligence assistance.
Conclusion
So is data annotation tech for real? Absolutely! And this is important, of course, it’s integral to how we build the smart gadgets that surround us. That could be anything from teaching cars how to drive themselves or making sure that you see the most compelling videos in your favourite app.
You will witness more amazing things that data annotation is used to create, as you grow up. After all, you never know one day maybe working in data annotation and that will be how we shape the future of technology!
