A few weeks ago, we announced a major new partnership with Amazon Web Services to provide secure enterprise-grade data labeling services on SageMaker Ground Truth. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth is a new capability of Amazon SageMaker that makes it easy for customers to efficiently and accurately label the large datasets required in the training of Machine Learning systems. iMerit is one of only two such partners companies for AWS anywhere in the world.
Today, we are excited to announce that iMerit USA has also become a SageMaker Ground Truth partner, which means that AWS customers can now partner with us for US-based data labeling services, conducted by our in-house, full-time expert workforce. This is especially useful for customers who need their data work completed in US-based facilities. One unique advantage of our US-based teams is their bilingual text labeling capabilities: customers can rely on iMerit for entity extraction and classification both in English and in Spanish.
You can read more about this new announcement and our US-based data services in this blog post on the AWS Machine Learning Blog.
Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth was created to address the dataset labeling ‘bottleneck’ and help Machine Learning scale beyond the R&D lab. Until now, customers had to rely on their in-house teams or on third party vendors to accurately label their data, which presented huge challenges in terms of quality control, cost and time, and made the launch of commercial-scale ML systems costly and time-consuming. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth solves this problem with a combination of automated workflows and human intelligence.
The service supports different types of content (images, audio and text) across the following services: text classification, image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation.
Swami Sivasubramanian is the Vice-president of Machine Learning at Amazon Web Services and tells us: “Many companies and organizations need to train Machine Learning models using their own data, but preparing the datasets is time consuming and expensive. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth is a managed service that provides a simpler and faster method to get labeled data. iMerit is a trusted APN Partner offering a team of trained specialists who can help customers accurately and securely label the datasets required for training Machine Learning systems. With the integration of iMerit, we are excited about making the process of preparing their training datasets even faster and easier.”
Some early-access customers have already been working with Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth and iMerit to label image data, including leading recruitment firm ZipRecruiter. Their CTO, Craig Ogg also shared his thoughts on the benefits of this new partnership between iMerit and AWS.
“Training a Machine Learning model to be able to identify the most important information requires a sizable dataset to start. The process to create this data is often expensive, manual, and time-consuming. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth will significantly help us reduce the time and effort required to create datasets for training. Due to the confidential nature of the data, we initially considered using one of our teams but it would take time away from their regular tasks and it would take months to collect the data we needed. Using Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth, we engaged iMerit, a professional labeling company that has been pre-screened by Amazon, to assist with the custom annotation project. With their assistance we were able to collect thousands of annotations in a fraction of the time it would have taken using our own team.”
