In this episode, I chat with Rob Munro, CTO of the newly branded Figure Eight, formerly known as CrowdFlower. Figure Eight’s Human-in-the-Loop AI platform supports data science & machine learning teams working on autonomous vehicles, consumer product identification, natural language processing, search relevance, intelligent chatbots, and more. Rob and I had a really interesting discussion covering some of the work he’s previously done applying machine learning to disaster response and epidemiology, including a use case involving text translation in the wake of the catastrophic 2010 Haiti earthquake. We also dig into some of the technical challenges that he’s encountered in trying to scale the human-in-the-loop side of machine learning since joining Figure Eight, including identifying more efficient approaches to image annotation as well as the use of zero shot machine learning to minimize training data requirements. Finally, we briefly discuss Figure Eight’s upcoming TrainAI conference, which takes place on May 9th & 10th in San Francisco. Train AI you can join me and Rob, along with a host of amazing speakers like Garry Kasparov, Andrej Karpathy, Marti Hearst and many more and receive hands-on AI, machine learning and deep learning training through real-world case studies on practical machine learning applications. For more information on TrainAI, head over to figure-eight.com/train-ai, and be sure to use code TWIMLAI for 30% off your registration! For those of you listening to this on or before April 6th, Figure Eight is offering an even better deal on event registration. Use the code figure-eight to register for only 88 dollars. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/125.