Snorkel.ai: Unlocking Subject Matter Experts to make Software 2.0 [Alex Ratner]

<p>Source: <a href="https://www.thecloudcast.net/2021/06/automated-data-labeling-for-ai-apps.html">https://www.thecloudcast.net/2021/06/automated-data-labeling-for-ai-apps.html</a><br>See also: <a href="https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/04/09/snorkel-training-dataset-management-with-braden-hancock/">https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/04/09/snorkel-training-dataset-management-with-braden-hancock/</a></p><p>Software 2.0 is <a href="https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35">Andrej Karpathy's idea</a> that instead of coding business logic by hand, the applications of the future will be trained by data. In other words, machine learning. But ML is limited by the quality of data available, and there is a lot of unstructured, unlabeled data out there that is still being manually labeled today. Scale.AI is a well known startup that has done very well offering a scalable manual labeling workforce, however they are still bottlenecked by the number of subject matter experts available for labeling critically important data, like cancer diagnosis and drug trafficking rings. In order to get labels from subject matter experts, you typically have to put them through a very tedious process of labeling to build up a useful structured dataset upfront before any useful machine learning can be done.</p><p>I did some very minor ML work about 5 years ago and found <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWv5yb_0OEw">Christopher Re's work on DeepDive at Stanford</a>. It takes a revolutionary approach by making it easy to write the labeling functions themselves. This turns the labeling process into an iterative, REPL like experience where subject matter experts can suggest a function, see its impact right away, and continue refining it, assisted by AI. DeepDive is now commercialized in a startup called Snorkel.AI, so I was very excited to find a clear explanation of Snorkelflow from its CEO, Alex Ratner. </p><p>Here it is!</p><p><strong>Transcript</strong></p><p><br></p><p>[00:01:15] <strong>Alex Ratn