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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are increasingly being applied to high-stakes domains. One emergent domain involves applying ML to healthcare to assist doctors in providing better care for patients. In the United States, however, people of color face disparities in access to healthcare, the quality of care received, and overall health outcomes. In dermatology, for example, darker skin tones are underrepresented in dermatology residency programs, textbooks, research, and diagnoses. We aren’t the first researchers to investigate this problem. Academics such as <a href="https://www.mdedge.com/dermatology/article/216697/pigmentation-disorders/racial-limitations-fitzpatrick-skin-type" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Dr. Susan Taylor</a>, <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-finds-gender-skin-type-bias-artificial-intelligence-systems-0212" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Joy Boulamwini</a>, and <a href="https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Timnit Gebru</a> have made great strides in identifying racial limitations around critical issues such as facial recognition and healthcare. In reviewing these various papers and studies, we recognized a need for a better understanding of the underlying data fueling this research. Specifically, we sought to understand how this underrepresentation impacts an ML model’s ability to accurately diagnose various skin conditions. In collaboration with our research partner, MIT Media Lab, we analyzed and evaluated deep neural networks trained on clinical images in dermatology.<h1>Methodology:</h1> The team at Scale annotated 16,577 clinical images sourced from two dermatology atlases — DermaAmin and Atlas Dermatologico — with Fitzpatrick skin type labels. The Fitzpatrick labeling system, while not perfect, is a six-point scale originally developed for classifying sun reactivity of skin phenotype. The Fitzpatrick scale served as the basis for skin color in emojis and, more recently, the Fitzpatrick scale has been used in computer vision applications to evaluate algorithmic fairness and model accuracy. The annotated images represent 114 skin conditions with at least 53 images and a maximum of 653 images per skin condition. The annotations, which we are calling the Fitzpatrick 17k Dataset, have been open-sourced <a href="https://github.com/mattgroh/fitzpatrick17k" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a> if you would like to explore the dataset in greater detail.<img src="https://imagedelivery.net/wLbZE4_NzVVdgHc15St55g/8176b7a8-94e7-494b-746f-17563912e200/public" alt="The Fitzpatrick Skin Type Scale"> After the dataset had been labeled, researchers at MIT trained a transfer learning model based on a VGG-16 deep neural network architecture pre-trained on the seminal ImageNet dataset to classify various skin conditions. For more details on how the model was trained, we encourage you to read the full paper <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.09957" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>. <h2>Research Findings:</h2> The research found that the data used to train a model does matter. By tagging the images with Fitzpatrick labels, researchers found that the dataset contains 3.6 times more images of the two lightest Fitzpatrick skin types than the two darkest Fitzpatrick skin types. The underrepresentation of dark skin images in the dataset — and in dermatology atlases more broadly — led to larger disparities in the model’s ability to correctly diagnose skin conditions involving darker skin tones. While more research is required to identify where accuracy disparities are greatest across skin types, this research empirically shows that the data a model is trained on matters. More importantly, it matters how data is collected and what type of data is collected. Before developing and deploying large-scale ML models in the healthcare sector, we encourage researchers and practitioners to consider and examine biases in training datasets to ensure healthcare disparities are not unintentionally amplified by these models.

Improving clinical dermatology diagnostics with better data

Scale AI & MIT Media Lab: Improving Clinical Dermatology Diagnostics

Scale AI and Research Partner MIT Media Lab Analyze Bias in Dermatological Datasets to Improve Diagnoses

Have you ever missed the on-ramp for a freeway because you were in the wrong lane? Or had to circle a block in search of a package drop box or specific entrance? These moments may just be minor, albeit annoying, inconveniences for us as individuals. But for autonomous vehicles, ride sharing, or logistics companies that make thousands of daily trips and deliveries, the costs of such navigation errors add up quickly. Companies that depend on high-quality maps for precise navigation have two off-the-shelf solutions:<ol><li>Regular map applications like those used by individual</li><li> consumers do not provide enough detail and users can’t layer their own data</li><li> on top of these maps in a scalable way.</li><li> </li><li>HD map companies offer more turnkey solutions but customers</li><li> still can’t edit or update the data themselves because the maps are owned by</li><li> the mapping companies. Furthermore, it’s a time-consuming process to get</li><li> maps updated and customers must wait for vendors to cover new regions.</li><li> </li><li> </li></ol> Lacking a viable off-the-shelf option, many companies opt to build their own maps. Scaling the process to generate large volumes of extremely precise annotated map data poses the same challenges as scaling data pipelines for any other AI application.<h2>Introducing: Scale Mapping</h2> <a href="https://scale.com/mapping" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Scale Mapping</a> gives customers the most flexible, scalable, and transparent mapping solution. With Scale Mapping, customers can generate high-precision maps down to the centimeter level for simulations and real-world testing, enhance prediction and motion planning by effectively predicting another agent’s intent, train perception models to live-detect map features, and improve navigation and route planning to maximize efficiency.<h3>How It Works:</h3> High-precision annotations of large-scale maps are extremely challenging. To minimize cognitive load for human annotators (Taskers) and to maximize labeling efficiency and accuracy, Scale Mapping first breaks map sections down into tiles. From there Taskers start with vector annotations, or annotations of physical map features such as lane boundaries and crosswalks. Once the vector annotations are complete, semantic annotations — or the annotation of concepts — such as the location of package drop boxes or a bike lane becoming a turn lane is layered on. Lastly, relationships between map features and map semantics are linked, such as a traffic light to a specific traffic lane. After all three layers of annotations are complete, the individual map tiles are stitched back together to create a comprehensive map.<img src="https://imagedelivery.net/wLbZE4_NzVVdgHc15St55g/b4e2e6c5-8eb3-4305-9a65-afb211dbc100/public" alt="How Scale Mapping Works Diagram"> <h2>Real-World Impact</h2> Because it can support data inputs from LiDAR sensors, cameras, and even existing maps, this workflow allows customers to develop, update, and own their own proprietary HD maps at speed. Scale Mapping is already trusted by leaders in the autonomous driving industry. Nuro, one of the leaders in the self-driving delivery space, and Domino’s, the largest pizza company in the world based on global retail sales, launched autonomous pizza delivery in Houston. Nuro’s R2 robot is the first completely autonomous, occupantless on-road delivery vehicle with regulatory approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation. <iframe class="ql-video" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true" src="https://nuro.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/Nuro-Delivery-B-Roll-2021.mp4?mtime=20210411191557&amp;focal=none"></iframe> Scale partnered with Nuro to improve perception and mapping models for the R2, starting with providing high-quality, rapidly labeled data. With Scale Mapping, Scale is moving up the autonomous driving stack by enhancing localization and mapping capabilities. Put simply, the R2 needs to know where it is, what’s around it, where it’s going, and how to get there. The data Scale provides lets the R2 do exactly that while ensuring the safe, accurate, and efficient delivery of pizzas. <img src="https://imagedelivery.net/wLbZE4_NzVVdgHc15St55g/d156b7f7-dc7e-4f28-0442-9c4317206b00/public" alt="Nuro Quote"> In terms of the impact across our Nuro projects, we doubled the amount of data annotated from 2020 to 2021. Talk to our team today for a demo and more information about our industry-leading quality with transparency, flexibility, and rapid turnaround.

The flexible solution to develop and scale your own custom maps.

Introducing: Scale Mapping

Own Your Own Maps. Introducing: Scale Mapping

Many industries that impact our day-to-day lives, including logistics, manufacturing, financial services, insurance, and government, still run on paper. These documents contain critical information that powers important workflows like clearing shipments past customs, processing insurance claims, underwriting loans, tracking machinery parts, issuing tax refunds, and parsing clinical lab reports. Unfortunately, document processes still involve people manually keying in information into digital systems. These labor-intensive workflows significantly increase the time it takes to extract information, leading to added costs, poor customer experience, and lack of scalability for high volumes of documents. To tackle this challenge, companies previously used technologies like Optical Character Recognition (OCR). However, OCR solutions only transcribe text without extracting the most relevant fields. Most “intelligent” extraction solutions rely on customers to manually define templates or hard-coded sets of rules to handle data extraction. The rules dictate which part of the document corresponds to a certain field, which means the system can only process the document layouts that fit the original template. But, if you change vendors, document types, or update the document in any way, then you need to manually define another set of rules. Solutions like these take a lot of upkeep and result in poor quality when dealing with complicated, variable document types. Imagine being able to feed any type of document into a system that can quickly and accurately extract fields and link entities, even from new layouts or formats — all without any setup or maintenance effort on your end. Tech-forward companies are recognizing the importance of deploying a robust solution for automating entity extraction and linking because high quality, structured data can:<ul><li> </li><li> Improve existing services by making them faster, cheaper, and more accurate</li><li> </li><li>Enable new products based on the data unlocked.</li><li> </li></ul> The challenge is building a system that can adapt to real-world variations, especially across semi-structured and unstructured documents without sacrificing accuracy. Here is how we do it.<h2>Scale Document AI</h2> <a href="https://scale.com/document" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Scale Document AI</a> relies on our latest technology, Adaptive AI, to deploy refined machine learning models for customers who demand high quality and low latency when it comes to document processing. We leverage base models trained on millions of data points, and further refine those models for each customer use case. This enables us to extract and link entities from highly variable documents in seconds without putting the burden of setup on the customer. What’s unique about Adaptive AI is that we deliver a solution tailored to each use case to extract the data our customers need at high quality — regardless of any changes in document layouts. Unlike existing solutions, our machine learning models thrive on challenging and varied documents by parsing the structural layout of pages, contextualizing the meaning of words, and understanding the relationships between different fields. We developed Adaptive AI to actually understand the structure and the form fields’ meaning, rather than simply learning where on a document to find a field (e.g. understanding the vendor name instead of instructing that it is usually on top left of document).<img src="https://imagedelivery.net/wLbZE4_NzVVdgHc15St55g/7356c354-9a87-455d-d0e7-6618e6d73100/public" alt="Scale Document Workflow"> With Scale Document AI, you get:<ul><li>Fine-tuned document processing models trained to meet</li><li> your exact requirements. Achieve higher accuracy than off-the-shelf</li><li> solutions across a variety of document layouts.</li><li> </li><li>Guaranteed quality up to 99%+ and turnaround SLA times as fast as</li><li> seconds</li><li> with a fully automated or hybrid document processing workflow using our</li><li> API. Scale provides integrated models and optional human-in-the-loop</li><li> quality assurance workforce.</li><li> </li><li>Painless and quick setup so your teams can focus on what’s</li><li> important.</li><li> No more configuring templates or fixing errors. Upload sample documents</li><li> and provide a list of fields that you need extracted. There is no further</li><li> setup or maintenance required to start processing documents.</li><li> </li><li>Dedicated machine learning and engineering support. Work</li><li> with a world class technical team of machine learning researchers and</li><li> engineers dedicated to your document processing needs. We can help you</li><li> adapt as you scale your business.</li><li> </li></ul> <h2>Real-World Impact</h2> Scale Document AI serves many industries across financial services, insurance, real estate, logistics, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and government, across a variety of document types and use cases such as loan origination, customer onboarding, invoice/receipt/bill processing, fraud prevention, claims processing, title closing, shipment processing, and clinical lab report extraction. In logistics, we partnered with <a href="https://www.flexport.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Flexport</a>, which is building the platform for global trade, to significantly increase efficiency and reduce costs in what used to be a manual effort for processing critical shipping paperwork. We quickly deployed our Adaptive AI for important logistics documents like Bill of Lading, Arrival Notices, and others to reduce data extraction errors and improve compliance across Flexport’s global trade network. James Chen, Flexport CTO, explained the impact of our partnership at <a href="https://scale.com/events/transform/videos/modernizing-global-trade" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Scale Transform</a>, our conference earlier this year: <img src="https://imagedelivery.net/wLbZE4_NzVVdgHc15St55g/a186b4ed-c72c-4575-e374-aeb715927c00/public" alt="James_Chen_Quote"> Another applicable area for Scale Document AI is financial services, specifically bill pay services, loan origination, and claims processing. <a href="https://www.brex.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Brex</a>, a $7.4B startup modernizing banking for businesses, uses Scale Document to power its new premium bill pay product. When customers submit invoices in the Brex app or forward an email with an invoice to the designated Brex email, our Adaptive AI extracts all relevant information from these invoices instantly and accurately to pay the bill, at higher quality and faster than off the shelf solutions. We are excited to reimagine document processing to enable faster and better workflows for challenging document types where conventional approaches don’t hit the mark. If you want to achieve modern operational efficiencies through AI and see tangible downstream improvements in business metrics, contact us at documentai@scale.com or sign up on our <a href="https://scale.com/sales" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">website</a>.

Scale Document's Adaptive AI offers customers a machine learning based document processing solution for instant results and none of the costly mistakes. 

OCR is not Enough. Try Scale Document AI.

OCR Is Not Enough. Try Scale Document AI.

<h3>How did you join Scale?</h3> I knew of Scale because one of my friends from college worked here. When I was choosing my first job, I was considering either joining a large tech company or a small startup. All my internships had been at large tech companies, so at the time I was nervous about whether I wanted to join a small startup. But I knew I wanted to do something that had a higher ceiling, where I could be really excited about the possibilities. <h3>What about the company’s mission is the most compelling to you?</h3> I strongly believe in our mission to democratize and accelerate the development of AI. What excites me is that we're solving problems that are new, that other companies haven't solved before. We're tackling issues that are going to be more and more important as AI becomes more and more prevalent. So, I think the most compelling part of the mission for me is the impact of AI and the role that we get to play in it. <h3> </h3><h3> You worked at big companies prior to joining Scale. What was the</h3><h3> transition like? What advice do you share with others contemplating a</h3><h3> similar move?</h3><h3> </h3> I liked that at Scale, I was given a lot of ownership from day one. At larger companies, sometimes it can take years before you're really trusted to make large decisions, and at Scale I was given the opportunity to grow really quickly, to give input, and to contribute to work that I felt was very impactful very quickly. In terms of advice, I would say don't feel like you're confined to just what your job title might be. There might often be many different things you need to do to achieve an outcome. Sometimes that's engineering, sometimes that's operations, sometimes that's product management. And I think one of the things that has made Scale successful is we have a lot of people who are willing to do things outside of their job description to achieve important outcomes, and so I think that is a valuable piece of advice. <h3>What is the most exciting project you’ve worked on?</h3> What I'm most proud of is my work as the product manager for the 2D team. While I was working on 2D, we saw large growth to the business, in terms of number of customers and revenue. At the same time, we did a lot to improve our margins and reduce our costs. I'm very proud of that team and how we were able to achieve that amount of growth. It was the first time in my career that I was able to work on something at that level. <h3>What are some of your favorite things about the culture?</h3> I really like that people are encouraged to disagree with each other and to have conversations about those disagreements. I think that helps make Scale a really great place to learn. I also really like the people at Scale - they’re a lot of fun to work with and have really great senses of humor. <h3>What is the most valuable thing you’ve learned here?</h3> Problem-solving skills and the ability to own a business outcome. And there's not one specific skill that's necessary for that, but I think gaining confidence in my ability to do that, and gaining experience in doing that has been very valuable. <a href="https://scale.ai/jobs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Explore Open Positions</a>

Scale Product Manager Sara Xiang shares insights on why she joined, projects she's worked on and life at Scale.

Life at Scale AI | Sara Xiang

Life at Scale

Scale AI was founded on the belief that better data → better AI. There has recently been a renewed focus on “good” data and its impact on the quality of models in the industry. Andrew Ng, who spoke at our first Transform conference earlier this year, emphasized this point: “We spend a lot of time sourcing and preparing high-quality data before we train the model, just like a chef would spend a lot of time to source and prepare high-quality ingredients before they cook a meal. I feel like a lot of the emphasis of the work in AI should shift to systematic data preparation.” While we have intuitively understood the importance of data quality, the Google Research Team paper <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/0d556e45afc54afeb2eb6b51a9bc1827b9961ff4.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">"Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work’: Data Cascades in</a><a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/0d556e45afc54afeb2eb6b51a9bc1827b9961ff4.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> High-Stakes AI"</a> published earlier this year was the first we’ve come across that attempts to quantify and provide empirical evidence of “bad” data’s impacts.<h3>Overview of the Paper</h3> AI models increasingly are being applied in a broad range of domains from healthcare to climate change. Based on interviews conducted with 53 global AI practitioners working on a variety of applications, the paper’s researchers define, identify causes of, and present empirical evidence on the problem of data cascades. Data cascades are compounding events caused by data issues that lead to negative, downstream effects, resulting in the accumulation of tech debt over time. For more details on the paper’s findings, we encourage you to read the full research <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/0d556e45afc54afeb2eb6b51a9bc1827b9961ff4.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>.<h3>Key Takeaways</h3> The paper notes that 92% of AI practitioners interviewed experienced at least one data cascade or adverse outcomes caused by problems in a data processing pipeline. The paper also cites several causes of cascades, but the number one cause — cited by 54.7% of the practitioners interviewed — was “interacting with physical world bitterness.” In other words, when AI systems move from their well-defined, static development environments and are deployed in the physical world, the systems are challenged by the dynamic changes inherent in the real world.<img src="https://imagedelivery.net/wLbZE4_NzVVdgHc15St55g/5e7113c0-9478-4cf4-54d3-839083523d00/public" alt="Data Cascades Causes"> Table 1: Prevalence and distribution of data cascades, triggers, and impacts. IN is short for India, EA &amp; WA for East African and West African countries respectively, and US is for the United States. Many ML researchers and engineers today are taught to develop models using pristine datasets in academic settings. In real-world applications, however, the data ML engineers must work with is messy or even non-existent. While the paper’s focus is on high-stakes domains with limited resources, even in high-resource settings, ML engineers or data scientists will hack together a data pipeline leveraging whatever tools and services they can find. The lack of unified infrastructure to support comprehensive data operations creates structural failures that ultimately cause data cascades and their commensurate tech debt. Exacerbating the issue, as noted by <a href="https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2015/file/86df7dcfd896fcaf2674f757a2463eba-Paper.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sculley et al., 2015</a>, complex models erode abstraction boundaries for ML systems. Developing and maintaining traditional code already results in tech debt. But that is significantly compounded by ML-specific issues — including data dependencies, analysis debt, and configuration debt — that are much harder to detect, diagnose, and fix. The longer tech debt accumulates, the more pervasive it becomes. The more pervasive the tech debt, the more time and effort ML teams ultimately must spend to resolve issues, resulting in productivity loss and slower deployments. <h1> </h1><h1> Where Scale Comes In: Minimizing Data Cascades by Focusing on Data Work</h1><h1> </h1> Scale was founded on the belief that for AI and ML, data is the new code. By providing a data-centric, end-to-end solution to manage the entire ML lifecycle, we bridge that skill gap, so ML engineers don’t have to change how they work. By focusing on the data, we enable our customers to focus on the model work, not the data work, minimizing the risk of data cascades and making AI systems safer and more robust. <h2>Data Annotation</h2> We started this journey by focusing on data annotation. When we first began providing data annotation solutions to our autonomous vehicle customers, our quality assurance (QA) systems were highly manual. Human QA Agents or Queue Managers would audit and re-check sample tasks and manually assign scores to individual Taskers. Over the years, as we expanded into new use cases and new industries, we have built out a variety of internal tools to automate many of these QA processes including: <h4>Automated Benchmarks</h4> With benchmarks, we programmatically take an annotation task we know is correct, create an error in that task (usually a common mistake we’ve seen Taskers make), and serve them as regular tasks to our Taskers. By leveraging benchmark tasks, we can automatically give Taskers scores based on whether they fixed the error before submitting. This then allows us to understand how well each Tasker is performing without manually scoring each individual on a variety of tasks. <h4>Linters</h4> Linters are tools designed to catch errors and flag anomalies. At Scale, we leverage a variety of types of linters. For example, a response-based linter looks at a submitted task and checks for possible errors such as annotations that should not exist, like duplicate bounding boxes for the same object. Over time, we have layered response-based linters into the UI to flag issues for our Taskers as they annotate -- for example, warnings when the size of a bounding box appears too large. Moving beyond our core expertise in data annotation, our team has been hard at work building products to support the entire ML lifecycle. These include: <h2>Data Collection</h2> Collecting diverse and representative data, which is the first step in developing a machine learning model, can be a challenge, especially for content and language use cases where there is much more subjectivity. Leveraging our existing global Tasker base, our text and audio collection workflows are API supported and seamlessly integrate with our data labeling pipeline for seamless end-to-end dataset creation. <iframe class="ql-video" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true" src="https://scaleai.wistia.com/embed/medias/uq2zsk4cy0"></iframe> <h2>Data Management</h2> While more training data is generally better than less data, once data is collected, ML teams need to select what data to annotate. Today, most ML teams do this either by randomly selecting data to label, or manually parsing through their data to identify valuable examples. Scale Nucleus uses active learning and advanced querying to help ML teams visualize their data, understand over- or under-represented labels and attributes to help mitigate bias, and identify edge cases to address the long-tail challenges of machine learning development. Nucleus also enables model-assisted QA, using model predictions (model errors in particular) to identify errors in labeled data and to improve data quality. In the video below, we show how active learning powers the Autotag feature of Nucleus to allow users to automatically search for and tag similar images — in this case flowers. <iframe class="ql-video" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true" src="https://scaleai.wistia.com/embed/medias/yocc96733p"></iframe> <h2>Data Generation</h2> The ability to understand how ML models will react to rare or dangerous real-world scenarios is crucial for safety-critical computer vision applications. However, it’s not always feasible to collect enough examples of edge cases in the real world. Currently in alpha, Scale customers can augment ground-truth training data or generate scenarios from scratch to simulate a variety of cameras, sensors, or environmental conditions such as fog or night-time lighting. With data generation, ML teams can synthesize specific, troublesome scenarios (often pre-labeled) to expose their models to more edge cases and under-represented scenarios than they could otherwise collect. <h1>Real-World Impact</h1> As we noted in our <a href="https://scale.com/blog/series-e" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Series E Announcement</a>, we’ve already seen the impact that the right data infrastructure can bring to our customers. From 10X’ing throughput for Toyota to improving States Title’s document processing model to more than 95%, we have freed up many of our customers’ ML teams to focus on the model work instead of the data work. We’re proud to be trusted by the world’s most ambitious AI teams to build the data foundation that will set up their organizations for success for decades to come. In the coming weeks, we’ll also dive deeper into some of the topics — like how to solve for the long-tail distributions of data with better data management — on our blog. In the meantime, if you or your team are looking for an end-to-end solution for your datasets, <a href="https://scale.com/sales" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reach out to us</a>. We’d love to hear from you.

Better Data = Better AI. Understanding the downstream impact of "bad" data and how to mitigate these issues.

Scale AI: Doing the Data Work so Customers Can Focus on the Model Work

Doing the Data Work to Mitigate Data Cascades

I cannot express how excited I am to join the team at Scale. To understand why, one needs to look no farther than my background. Over the past 33 years, I’ve dedicated my career to serving our country, keeping our citizens safe, and improving the technology our warfighters and analysts use to protect us. I’ve seen first-hand how artificial intelligence (AI) already has and will continue to change our world. I swore an oath over three decades ago and I remain committed to it today. While I’m not able to fly my old fighter jet, I can and will contribute by helping our country adopt and operationalize AI. Enter Scale. I was introduced to Scale during my time as General Manager of National Security at Microsoft, when we supported a mutual U.S. Department of Defense customer. I was immediately impressed by the technology and – more importantly – the people. From the CEO to the front line, the entire team was committed to customer success and delivering the right knowledge and the right technology at the right time to achieve operational impact. As I dug deeper, I learned these activities weren’t just demonstrations to excite investors, they were part of the team’s DNA. It was their purpose. And they were really (really) good at it. The U.S. government is at the precipice of AI adoption. There are numerous private companies conducting countless AI experiments. Most, however, treat AI as an out-of-reach, custom commodity. What if it isn’t? What if we could operationalize and democratize AI so warfighters, analysts, and mission owners could have ready-access to AI capabilities? What if we gave them the tools to translate the complex pipeline of AI activities into something no more complicated than building a spreadsheet? This is what Scale does. Every day. Scale is full of phenomenally talented people, creating outstanding technology, who are committed to the success of our country. I can’t wait to see how, together, we accelerate AI readiness across the U.S. government. Join us at <a href="https://scale.com/government" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">scale.com/government</a>.

Mark Valentine - formerly Microsoft’s GM of National Security - joins Scale AI as our Head of Federal

Scale AI welcomes Mark Valentine as Head of Federal 

Why I Joined Scale AI

When we started Scale nearly five years ago, our mission was to accelerate the development of AI. Today, I’m proud to say that we’re seeing this mission come to life, as customers across industries, from finance to e-commerce to transportation to government, are shipping AI projects that touch our everyday lives.But we’re still just scratching the surface of the potential that AI has to transform every business and industry, which is why we’re happy to share that Scale has raised $325 million in Series E funding, co-led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks Capital, and Tiger Global. Additional new investors in the round include Wellington Management and Durable Capital followed by existing investors Coatue, Index, Founders Fund, and YC. The interest and opportunity for AI is only accelerating, and this new funding will help us continue to expand our team and products to meet this growing demand. Additionally, Jeff Wilke, former CEO of Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer business, will be joining as Advisor to the CEO."The AI industry is at an inflection point where every business is looking to implement an AI strategy and we are starting to see a real-world impact. We believe Alex and his team at Scale have been critical to enabling businesses across industries reap the full benefits of AI and are taking the industry from proof of concept to reality," said Neil Mehta, Founder and Managing Partner at Greenoaks Capital.As we discussed with over 9,000 of the leading minds in AI at our inaugural <a href="https://scale.com/events/transform" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Scale Transform conference</a>, we’re moving from a theoretical and research based industry to one that’s rooted in impact and real business results. However, making this shift means companies are facing new challenges, which requires a systematic, data-centric approach to rapidly deploy their most important models.At Scale, we’re building the foundation to enable organizations to manage the entire AI lifecycle. Whether they have an AI team in-house or need a fully managed models-as-a-service approach, we partner with our customers to build their strategy from the ground up and ensure they have the infrastructure in place to systematically deliver highly-performant models.We set out to solve this problem by starting with an essential building block, data annotation. Building on our expertise in delivering high-quality training data to world-leading machine learning teams, we are now applying our technical expertise and understanding to close the loop on the ML development lifecycle.Learn more about how we <a href="https://scale.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">accelerate ML development with an end-to-end solution</a>.<h2>Driving Real-World Impact</h2>We’ve already seen the impact that the right data infrastructure can bring to our customers. For example, companies like <a href="https://scale.com/customers/toyota" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Toyota</a> are paving the way for a future with fully autonomous vehicles, but need massive volumes of high-quality training data to reach this goal. By using our combination approach of machine learning with human insight, Scale was able to improve Toyota’s annotation throughput by 10X in a matter of weeks. For another customer, <a href="https://scale.com/customers/states-title" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">States Title</a>, Scale improved the accuracy of its document processing to more than 95 percent, freeing up their data science teams to work on actual data science work. And PayPal was able to leverage AI to efficiently validate and categorize millions of products from its partner merchants with our help.Brex, a high-growth startup reimagining financial systems, partnered with Scale to improve how businesses manage their money. Using our document processing solutions, their customers can now process invoices and pay bills faster and more accurately. We’ve also partnered with Flexport, the platform for global trade, to make historically manual logistics paperwork easier to execute and more accurate. Through our document processing solutions, we’ve enabled increased efficiency and compliance across Flexport's network of global trade stakeholders.These are just a few examples of how we’ve been supporting our customers. Over the past six months, we’ve continued to see demand growing across industries as leading organizations expand their AI programs. Today our customers range from the Department of Defense and U.S. Air Force; to leading fintechs like Brex, PayPal, and Square; to transport and logistics pioneers like Flexport, General Motors, Luminar, and Oshkosh; to beloved consumer brands and products like Etsy and Pinterest; to some of the world’s largest technology leaders like Samsung and SAP. We’re proud to be trusted by the world’s most ambitious AI teams to build the data foundation that will set their organizations up for success for decades to come. We can’t wait to see what else will be achieved with this technology as our customers continue to prove that production-ready AI isn’t just a pipe dream, but it’s already here.

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Scale AI has closed its Series E funding to accelerate the deployment of AI across every industry.

 Scale AI’s Series E: Deploying AI Across Every Industry

We are honored to share that Scale AI has been named to <a href="https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/artificial-intelligence-top-startups/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CB Insights’ AI 100</a> 2021 ranking of the most innovative private AI startups – highlighting our leading data annotation services. Five years ago, we built the foundational infrastructure for AI applications, labeling data to generate high-quality, large-scale training datasets. This past year, we expanded beyond data annotation launching Scale Nucleus to provide a single platform for dataset management, data selection and data annotation, to model development. Today, Scale AI serves as a trusted partner for organizations across industries like finance, transportation, e-commerce and more. All companies recognized on CB Insights’ list are private companies providing data infrastructure and hardware for AI applications, as well as those optimizing machine learning workflows and applying AI across a variety of industries including finance, healthcare, agriculture, insurance and more. The CB Insights research team selected the list based on patent activity, investor quality, news sentiment analysis, proprietary <a href="https://www.cbinsights.com/company-mosaic" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mosaic scores</a>, market potential, partnerships, competitive landscape, team strength and tech novelty. Looking ahead, Scale AI will continue to develop new products and services that address every phase of the AI development lifecycle to ensure Scale is the unified platform for AI development. If you’re interested in joining us on our mission of accelerating the development of AI, check out our <a href="https://scale.com/careers?location=All&amp;team=All" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">open positions</a>.

Scale AI has been named to CB Insights’ AI 100 2021 ranking of the most innovative private AI startups – highlighting our leading data annotation services.

Scale AI Named to CB Insights’ AI 100 2021 List

If you were not able to join Transform live, the keynote and breakout sessions are now available on our website for <a href="https://scale.com/events/transform" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">on-demand viewing</a>.Artificial Intelligence is now a part of our everyday lives. This technology is no longer theoretical, but is making a direct impact on businesses and their bottom lines. Nearly every industry has woken up to the potential of AI to transform their operations, whether it’s leading the charge of an entirely new category, like autonomous transportation, or modernizing legacy industries, like finance, real estate, and retail. AI is poised to be as transformative as the internet, and with that, organizations are learning that data is the new code. If they’re not investing in this critical technology now, they’re at risk of being left behind.Today we hosted our inaugural conference, Scale Transform, to showcase the state of AI today, from the latest research breakthroughs to the real-world impact across industries. As I shared in my opening remarks, “AI continues to surprise us with its new capabilities, primarily enabled through advancements in the core resources of data, compute, and algorithms.”We brought together more than 9,000+ leading researchers, practitioners, and executives to hear from the people and companies leading our industry forward. It was a day full of thoughtful conversations and presentations that examined the strides made in advancing these core resources, the challenges that still lie ahead, and what we can expect in the years to come.<h2>The Latest Advancements in Research</h2>AI research has been crucial in advancing the industry and our understanding of what’s possible. We’ve made significant progress across countless areas that have propelled the industry forward, yet there is still plenty more to be done. Some of the latest research discussed includes:<ul><li>Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) - Sam Altman, Co-Founder and CEO of OpenAI, touched on breakthrough research such as GPT-3, CLIP, and DALL·E, bringing us closer to achieving AGl. He said, “We may not even know when AGI actually emerges - it won’t be a single moment in time. The Turing Test for achieving AGI will be when AI is able to complete a percentage of human labor really well.”</li><li>Machine Learning Frameworks - The ecosystem of ML frameworks is evolving quickly. Google Software Engineer and Keras Creator Francois Chollet discussed how the roadmap for Keras in the next five years includes developing an ecosystem of reusable models such as KerasNLP and Keras Applications, increasing automation, enabling larger-scale cloud-based workflows, and supporting real-world deployment. Separately, Soumith Chintala, the Creator of PyTorch, shared what he considers the three personas in ML Development: The Modeler, Prod, and Compiler and discussed how these personas interacted with each other pre and post-deep learning. He closed his session by highlighting the need for PyTorch and other mainstream frameworks to maintain a high velocity to stay relevant and keep up with the latest innovations to enable Modelers.</li></ul><img src="https://imagedelivery.net/wLbZE4_NzVVdgHc15St55g/e15ac9ef-de00-4d59-28e4-1f16f6790900/public" alt="Soumith_Chintala_at_Transform">Soumith Chintala, Creator of PyTorch speaking on the future of ML frameworks.<ul><li>Autonomous Vehicles - Drago Anguelov, Distinguished Scientist and Head of Research at Waymo discussed the current state of perception, highlighting that, “Perception works very well for the vast majority of cases, but there are still some interesting long-tail problems like rare events that still need to be addressed.” Despite the remaining challenges, Anguelov discussed how the self-driving industry is beginning to “move up the stack” to tackle behavior prediction and planning, including the recent release of the updated Waymo Open Dataset to support further research into behavior prediction and motion forecasting. Anguelov also discussed how Waymo has successfully deployed L4 level autonomous vehicles in Chandler, AZ.</li></ul>This research and advancements made by others in the industry, including our conference partners, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), PyTorch, DeepLearning.AI, OpenAI, Pachama, and ELC, are the catalysts for meaningful use cases of AI.<h2>Challenges Ahead</h2>One of the biggest challenges for our industry is scaling AI systems from proofs of concept to production. A common theme heard from speakers throughout the day is that data is the critical foundation that companies must invest in to unlock AI’s full potential: Andrew Ng of DeepLearning.AI discussed how models can improve with more compute, data and parameters, however, it's not just about how much data you have, but the quality of that data. Andrew brought up a critical point here, because developing AI with bad data means it won’t live up to the potential and quite frankly it’s dangerous. It can lead to:<ul><li>Safety risks (e.g. self-driving cars not accurately identifying pedestrians or obstacles)</li><li>Biased algorithms (e.g. facial recognition bias)</li><li>Inaccurate results / recommendations (e.g. AI-driven healthcare decisions)</li></ul><img src="https://imagedelivery.net/wLbZE4_NzVVdgHc15St55g/35e8924f-cf73-4df9-a604-4540068a7400/public" alt="Andrew_Ng_at_Transform">Andrew Ng, speaking on the need for good data to develop AI.Bart Nabbe, VP of Strategic Partnerships and Corporate Development at Aurora, reinforced this point, stating, “You’re not building ladders to get to the moon, you need rockets.” And data is the fuel for those rockets. He emphasized that in the early days of training ML, every piece of data counts, however over time it’s increasingly important to be precise and focus on the long-tail, differentiated data to improve models.The importance of creating ethical and unbiased AI has been a focus in the industry for years, and as the technology has gone mainstream, so has the conversation. Global leaders and technology experts across the world are tackling challenges in developing AI that is ethical, as well as ensuring the benefits of AI can be equally distributed. Our speakers provided passionate advice on the topic:<img src="https://imagedelivery.net/wLbZE4_NzVVdgHc15St55g/a44a923d-4bb8-4a54-a5d1-e76d926c1300/public" alt="Kevin_Scott_at_Transform">Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft at Scale Transform.<ul><li>Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft, enumerated some of the challenges to ensuring that the benefits of AI are equally distributed. “We have an enormous amount of work to do. […] We’re learning a lot about biases in datasets, how to manage potential harms, ensuring the development of AI is inclusive, and that AI is being used safely.” Scott then spoke about how his teams at Microsoft are developing the tools (e.g., PowerBI, autoML) to enable developers without machine learning expertise to develop ML applications.</li></ul><img src="https://imagedelivery.net/wLbZE4_NzVVdgHc15St55g/836e4864-7ac9-4153-c016-6eb81d57dd00/public" alt="fei-fei_li_at_transform">Dr. Fei-Fei Li, speaking on the need for diversity in the field of AI.<ul><li>Diversity in the field of AI and greater interdisciplinary collaboration is key to minimizing the unintended consequences of AI, and Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University, Denning Co-Director, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) believes that as we continue to build AI, the industry needs to take inspiration from and embed human cognition, intention, and emotion in the technology for ML to achieve its full potential to augment human capabilities.</li></ul><h2>Real-World Impact</h2>Perhaps most importantly, we also heard inspiring work that’s happening in the real world – tangible examples of how AI is already improving the way we live and operate:<ul><li>Facebook reaches billions of people across the world and often needs to deploy products quickly, at scale from translations to social recommendations to generating descriptions of images for the visually impaired. On an average day, Facebook is processing 6 billion transactions a day. Head of Applied Research at Facebook AI, Srinivas Narayanan, relayed the importance of “getting the most bang for your buck” for your labeled data by augmenting it with various techniques, and creating AI responsibly by viewing fairness as a process and not a binary notion in order to implement the best AI across a variety of use cases.</li><li>The financial industry has complex workflows filled with massive amounts of paperwork that often includes tedious manual processing. During a panel, Brex’s Co-Founder and Co-CEO Henrique Dubugras discussed how applying AI technology like document understanding has helped the financial world increase efficiencies and lower costs while freeing up humans to focus on more fulfilling work.</li></ul><h2>What’s Next</h2>The continued advancements in AI have created incredible applications in today’s world but there is an exciting future that awaits - from the potential to create safer transportation to agricultural benefits like increasing crop yields and improving healthcare outcomes. At Scale, we’re excited to have a hand in creating trusted, ubiquitous use of AI and we can’t wait to see what’s next.A special thank you to our conference partners: Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), PyTorch, DeepLearning.AI, OpenAI, Pachama, and ELC. We are also grateful for all our incredible speakers representing organizations including Aurora, Blend, Brex, Cruise, DoorDash, Etsy, Facebook AI, Fast.AI, Flexport, Google, Hugging Face, iRobot, Microsoft, Qualtrics, RedFin, University of Toronto, and Waymo.If you were not able to join us live, the keynote and breakout sessions are now available on our <a href="https://scale.com/events/transform" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">website for on-demand viewing</a>.

Scale AI Hosts Inaugural Scale Transform, Showcasing AI’s Potential to Improve Our Lives

Scale Transform 2021 | The Future of AI

Scale Transform: AI Leaders Showcase Research Breakthroughs and Real-World Impact

The most impactful technology trends often start with infrastructure buildout. Starting my career in 1998 at Cisco at the height of the dot-com bubble, Cisco was laying down the internet infrastructure. While the dot-com bubble burst, it did lay the foundation for the next generation of infrastructure: cloud computing. This in turn paved the way to the SaaS revolution. When I joined Twilio in 2011, it was in the early stages of the now macro trend of highly programmable infrastructure through APIs. Twilio gave developers the flexibility to build applications efficiently leveraging these new interfaces. Great companies like Stripe, Twilio, AWS all provide a developer-first approach with a consumption-based model focusing on developer productivity. The days of the “snazzy SaaS” sales rep, snapping their fingers attempting to discount a per seat license are over. As applications, infrastructure and our world become increasingly more complex, consumption based go-to-market models, leading with a technical enterprise sale will be key. Now in 2021, as I contemplated joining Scale AI, it was clear that again we are in the beginning stages of a new macro trend of AI infrastructure. Similarly to before, there will be an infrastructure build out, followed by end-user applications. Scale is on a mission of making AI developers more productive. Starting with data annotation and highly accurate training data, their first product, Scale Image is market leading. Subsequently, Scale continued to innovate and released several products including Scale Text, Video, and Document all focused on solving problems for AI/machine learning engineers. With a consumption based model and a developer-led focus,I believe there are some great parallels between the AI macro-trends and the trends of the past. Not to mention, after meeting and spending time with the team, it was clear to me that the company culture and leadership are aligned to me personally. The focus on diversity &amp; inclusion, intelligence, transparency, while making decisions based on data gave me great comfort to know that I wasn’t just joining a hyper growth company, but also a once in a lifetime generational company that I could be proud to say I contributed to. As an early employee of Twilio, I had a similar opportunity to shape their history, and now as the Chief Revenue Officer for Scale, I get the opportunity once again to shape, mold and build Scale. It wasn’t a hard decision to join Scale, the opportunity to build the next generation of infrastructure focused on machine-learning and AI, was a no brainer. I couldn’t be more excited about Scale, the opportunity, and bringing my collective experiences to lead their go-to-market organization. If you’d like to join my team, you can find all our open roles on our <a href="https://scale.com/careers" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">careers page</a>.

Chetan Chaudhary—formerly Twilio's VP of Vertical Sales—joins Scale AI as our CRO

Scale AI welcomes Chetan Chaudhary as CRO

Why I Joined Scale

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