From New Logo to Women in Tech: Toloka in April and May

We're here to bring you a brief recap of the most recent and relevant events at Toloka. Let's have a look at what we've all been up to in our digital hive.

Toloka gets a new look

Toloka has come a long way since its inception in 2014, and we felt it was time to replace our old daisy logo with a new one. After carefully considering a number of different options, we opted for an original dandelion fractal that also resembles a funky bouquet of popsicles.

We wanted to keep up with how the platform has developed and reflect the values of both sides: Tolokers and requesters. We're convinced that our new vibrant design does just that. We hope you like it, too!

If you're eager to learn the details, the logo's full journey can be traced here.

Spring events

One of this spring's highlights was being invited to participate in NAACL-HLT 2021. The Toloka team ran a hands-on tutorial, Crowdsourcing Natural Language Data at Scale. In addition, we've held three lively Crowd Science Seminars on the following topics:

• Skill estimation in crowdsourcing, by Dr. Alex Olshevsky of Boston University
• Risks of weighted majority vote, by Dr. Yevgeny Seldin of Copenhagen University
• Peer evaluation, by Dr. Nihar Shah of Carnegie Mellon University

Don't miss our upcoming seminars with even more industry secrets on their agenda. Seminars are held twice a month on Thursdays, and they are absolutely free!

Educational offerings

We believe that knowledge and education pave the way to everything else. This is why we continually develop courses related to the fields of machine learning and crowdsourcing.

• "Practical Crowdsourcing for Efficient Machine Learning" is free on Coursera. This new course is taught by an impressive team from Yandex and Toloka. It covers crowdsourcing from A to Z with a focus on task design, quality, and accuracy.
• "Practical Crowdsourcing for ML" was launched recently on Y-Data in Israel. Quick facts: 115 registered students, 45 lecture attendees, participants from top IT companies, and hands-on content.
• "Crowd Computing" is offered at TU Delft in the Netherlands. Ten teams of students are currently using Toloka grants to work on projects related to game design, conversational crowdsourcing, and more. Watch for the project results in our next digest!
• A 3-week course at Conférence universitaire de Suisse occidentale is now available for PhD students. This marks a stepping stone to international cooperation with top universities. We are excited to see more data scientists specializing in crowdsourcing methodologies!

Sample projects in Toloka Kit

Tired of the busywork of creating crowdsourcing projects? With Toloka's handy toolkit, you can reuse segments of code, easily train ML models, and take advantage of open-source features submitted by other contributors. This has already found its applications in image gathering, image segmentation, and SQuAD, and now the kit has more how-to examples for NLP, image classification, and geolocation.

Toloka in the media

Check out recent interviews with Toloka's founder and CEO, Olga Megorskaya. Analytics India Magazine published "Why Are Data Labelling Firms Eyeing Indian Market?", a business-oriented discussion that examines why and how Toloka plans to further penetrate the Indian market by recruiting more Tolokers from the subcontinent than ever before.

On a different note, We-Are-Tech-Women published a personal journey piece titled "Inspirational Woman". In this interview, Olga talks about her road from an ordinary data labeler to Toloka's fully fledged bellwether, as well as how being a woman in the tech field still poses a challenge today.

That's it for now, until the next digest. To get all the news while it's hot, check out our blog and follow us on social media. And remember: we're always here to address your questions and concerns, so drop us a line. Stay tuned, stay AI'ed, and crowdsource away!