TaQadam: progress for AI, progress for humanity

TaQadam makes visual data AI-ready for companies, and brings gamified mobile work in image analysis to the underemployed youth.

Social challenge:

Economic inequality, conflicts, and mass displacement resulted in the unprecedented youth unemployment globally, with 60 million jobs to be created to stabilize the situation in the Middle East alone. Associated economic and social costs are immense for governments and host communities. Much of the public sector and UN funding is directed towards ICT skills training for youth in Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan, yet conflict-affected economies cannot absorb and utilize the produced talent leaving thousands of tech-savvy, educated youths as subjects of exploitative informal economies.

But how a young refugee with a smartphone is different from a digital nomad? 

Mobile technology can create a viable infrastructure to connect youth, even in the post-conflict states, to the digital economy, and help overcome the challenges of transportation, the reliability of internet, and absence of payment systems. 

Because the digital economy has no borders, it should work for everyone and everywhere.

Business problem and opportunity:

In the era of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the data analysts and annotators are the new programmers. From robots, drones, self-driving cars, e-commerce the market need for vision technology for artificial intelligence is extraordinary, growing at 52% annually and sizing up to $100 billion dollar industry by 2022. One of the major building blocks of such AI-powered recognition systems is image annotation and analysis delivered with a human input - data training - which could be done from anywhere with the right infrastructure. Today’s data is driving tomorrow’s AI products. To be competitive in AI, innovation depends on having data-edge often more than a technology-edge, but up to 80% of data engineers’ time is spent on sourcing and preparing quality image data for AI models. Industry-specific, case-specific annotation service is missing in the market.

Solution:

TaQadam optimizes image annotation for data-driven companies with visual AI and delivers on-demand, vertical-specific, high-quality image annotation. With an API and a cloud architecture, we ensure a simple and secure way to build image data set with a high accuracy and precision, while simplifying the process of sourcing human insights from dedicated and trained teams of TaQadam.

We build up teams for specific use case and ensure a learning curve: whether it is satellite imagery, computer vision -enabled product-specific e-commerce, or recommendation engines!

And we create work of the future. Because whether you are a doctor of the future analyzing AI-enabled MRI imagery, or a firefighter analyzing a sensor-produced imagery - we are all going to be data analysts and annotators in the era of human-machine cooperation. 

But with TaQadam we will leave none behind in the process.

With gamification and mobile accessible work on TaQadam Android App, we transform the experience of annotation to fit the younger generations - from anywhere, so work of the future is:

• Accessible

• Flexible

• Allowing fluidity

• Community building

• and Fun.

TaQadam means Progress in Arabic. Progress for AI. Progress for Humanity.

Learn about our journey

Market-based crowdsourcing solutions have become a “race to the bottom”and lack quality control to match the growing complexity of vision technologies. TaQadam brings an innovative crowd management. Our work is gamified, allowing us to create specialized teams, reward champions among agents to ensure: timekeeping, domain expertise, and quality control. We build communities of practice and advance social cohesion in parallel. Our agents work remotely, on the mobile app, locking up low prices and high quality. Our API allows seamless data exchange with frequent changes in volumes and requirements, simplifying the companies’ workflow and allowing an active learning for AI.

Technology is integral to TaQadam’s scalability, data security and management, gamification and computer vision technologies.

TaQadam is built on AWS cloud architecture for a simple and secure data flow between the companies and TaQadam agents. Our mobile application TaQadam is a powerful tool to deliver precise annotations for object detection and pixel-accuracy semantic segmentation. Using TaQadam mobile technology,  annotations are delivered faster than on web-app annotation tools, with just a swipe and a click, and then transformed to a clients’ desired format (JSON, CSV).

Classification, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Instance Segmentation

• Commercializing at scale by testing and identifying the best client acquisition strategies, form channel partnerships, and land high volume contracts.
• Building business domain expertise in the selected categories: drones and satellites imagery, fashion and lifestyle, and explore others.
• Invest in technology stack for both clients and agents, ensuring the best user experience and simplicity.
• Advance our machine learning capability by employing advanced machine learning techniques to build pre-recognition tools for the higher precision of annotation.

Our theory of change for ‘work of the future’ goes beyond an income generation. TaQadam solution is a result of human-centered design, which identified an income as the highest priority. As an ‘acupuncture point’ in the ecosystem of other players and solutions advancing human development, with our growth we ‘buy the time’ for youth to participate in partner-driven advanced IT training, incorporate e-learning, and ensure further entrepreneurship development. We expect to bring our agents out of the cycle of systemic poverty by operating in the holistic programming ecosystem and ensure sustainable development and progress of each individual and their families.

Beneficiaries: TaQadam connected with Lebanon UN livelihoods cluster consisting of 49 organizations. We partnered with NGOs and UN agencies rendering ICT training to help us recruit, vet and onboard our agents. We believe in a partnership approach to scaling our agents' count.
Customers: TaQadam participated in a number of trade shows related to AI leading to the acquisition of early adopters. We are currently negotiating several channel partnerships which will allow us to grow fast and reduce customer acquisition efforts. TaQadam's online presence and SEO proved to be sufficient and brought us service requests.

To date TaQadam onboarded 100+ agents: Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese, from 5 different areas of Lebanon. Entire pool of 100 agents participated in our private beta client projects in April 2018. We are retaining original hires and building up ‘champions’ for future growth.

Introducing our agents:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7WG7y5eetc&t=13s

We estimate to directly impact lives of 350 in the first year, and scale to 2000 and 5000 in the following two years respectively. With the average pay out rate of $10 dollars a day to an agent (capped at 2-3 hours a day), and poverty line in Lebanon at $3.8 a day, we anticipate to also impact our agents’ families and advance communities.

Karina Grosheva, a Founder of TaQadam is a former UN Private Sector specialist and management consultant with Accenture, PwC. Kevin Nguyen is ML Engineer focusing on Computer Vision. Wisam Naji is a CTO bringing the diverse expertise in web and mobile development. Roy Andraos is a Marketing Specialist and a front-end developer with experience from the UN and business. Sendus Majanni is a community manager in Lebanon, currently at the American University of Beirut.We share a passion to advance TaQadam’s mission, and bring a combination of skills in business, technology, AI and social impact to deliver on the challenge.

We charge companies for API calls and annotations allowing agility and flexibility as an on-demand service with SLAs. With technology allowing the seamless process and continuous reduction of client acquisition and account management costs, we are set to be a very profitable business at par with the competitors from Silicon Valley. We believe, that with the investment to build tools and processes to reach the most vulnerable youth, we also built a viable and unique competitive model, transforming a social challenge into a business opportunity.

Our sustainability and growth strategy:

We are supported by PhDs in Computer Vision (Advisory Board) to continuously advance our technology to remain relevant and market-fit.

We are supported by a former UN Advisor (Advisory Board) to ensure partnerships and expansion. We believe in leveraging public sector partnerships so not to reinvent the wheels and remain nimble and efficient.

We live during the era of great turbulence: political paralysis and fragile economies, deep inequities and inadequate systems for generation-Y and Z, and a vastly more interconnected and independent world. Problem-solving for the required transformative changes is not to be delivered alone. We believe in a power of community and networks - to learn, grow and innovate for the most pressing wicked problems with technology. In TaQadam we consider ourselves as ‘political entrepreneurs’, solving a complex phenomenon of ‘human rights poverty’ in the post-conflict economies, and seek for a visibility, support and advocacy for our cause.

As a mission-driven enterprise, we are set for the journey with many more challenges than a regular AI tech start up, such as politics and populism, growing societal stigma against refugees, extra resources to set up the processes and operations in the conflict-affected countries, while competing in the very dynamic market of technology and AI. We believe the recognition by Solve will be transformative for our development and will bring us partners, business and funding opportunities, technology mentorship from MIT.