We are traveling through the era of Software 2.0, in which the key components of modern software are increasingly determined by the parameters of mach

Hand Labeling Considered Harmful

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2021-06-24 15:30:34

We are traveling through the era of Software 2.0, in which the key components of modern software are increasingly determined by the parameters of machine learning models, rather than hard-coded in the language of for loops and if-else statements. There are serious challenges with such software and models, including the data they’re trained on, how they’re developed, how they’re deployed, and their impact on stakeholders. These challenges commonly result in both algorithmic bias and lack of model interpretability and explainability.

There’s another critical issue, which is in some ways upstream to the challenges of bias and explainability: while we seem to be living in the future with the creation of machine learning and deep learning models, we are still living in the Dark Ages with respect to the curation and labeling of our training data: the vast majority of labeling is still done by hand.

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