Good Jobs & Inclusive Entrepreneurship

Humans in the Loop

Providing refugees with work and skills to drive forward the artificial intelligence Industry

Team Lead

Iva Gumnishka

Solution Pitch

The Problem

Conflict-affected people face severe hurdles in securing employment. Armed conflict has caused unemployment levels to spike in Syria and Iraq, and in Turkey only 50,000 out of 2 million working age refugees and asylum-seekers have work permits. Due to permit issues and a lack of opportunities, many conflict-affected people end up relying on humanitarian assistance or working in the informal sector, where they are vulnerable to exploitation.

The Solution

Humans in the Loop provides conflict-affected people with training and work opportunities in the artificial intelligence industry. Working as a B2B outsourcing company, Humans in the Loop connects directly with computer vision startups and researchers and supplies human input in order to help improve their models. Services include: collecting the ground truth data set; annotating data; verification of machine outputs; and edge case handling.

Professional "humans in the loop" are trained on AI and machine learning bias as well as a variety of annotation tools and platforms. This work does not require English capabilities and can be done from home. Workers also acquire essential computer and workplace skills that increase their professional opportunities in the future.

Stats

Humans in the Loop has provided more than 300 conflict-affected people across Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq with dignified remote work opportunities in the AI annotation field.

Market Opportunity

Image and data annotation is a growing market estimated to reach $1 Billion by 2023. Human input, including collection and manual annotation, is key to developing self-driving cars, drones and satellites, facial recognition, medical imagery, and more. To perform this work, Humans in the Loop taps into a frequently overlooked demographic of conflict-affected people in the Balkans and the Middle East, including 3.5 million refugees in Turkey and 6 million internally displaced people in Syria and Iraq.