Data Annotation

Microscopy has a labor problem. Not the photogenic kind where a scientist leans into a glowing instrument and discovers the secret architecture of life before lunch. The duller problem is that modern light sheet fluorescence microscopy can produce rich three-dimensional volumes faster than expert teams can label them. Segmentation requires voxel-level masks. Stain classification requires domain knowledge. Restoration needs paired degraded and high-quality images, which nature, unhelpfully, does not always provide in tidy folders. ...

A moderation queue looks simple until two reasonable reviewers disagree. One reviewer sees a political comment as ordinary partisan sarcasm. Another sees the same sentence as offensive. A third is unsure, which is not the same as being confused. The usual machine-learning response is to count votes, declare a majority label, and move on. Very efficient. Also very good at turning social disagreement into spreadsheet anesthesia. ...

Clicks are a cost centre. In a 3D annotation tool, deleting an unnecessary bounding box may take one or two seconds. Creating a missed vehicle annotation from scratch takes about 23 seconds. Correcting a poorly positioned box falls somewhere in between. These actions may all count as model errors. They do not cost the same amount of human time. ...