Humans in the Loop

Humans in the Loop is a hybrid between a non-profit foundation and a for-profit social enterprise which has been working for the past 6 years towards the inclusion of refugees and conflict-affected people in the AI supply chain, as well as in the digital work field, through upskilling and paid remote work opportunities. Our shared mission is to provide a diverse group of conflict-affected and displaced people with access to career development support, upskilling, and remote work opportunities to train and monitor AI systems. We are active across the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, and our work related opportunities are primarily focused on communities affected by armed conflict and are dis... read more Humans in the Loop is a hybrid between a non-profit foundation and a for-profit social enterprise which has been working for the past 6 years towards the inclusion of refugees and conflict-affected people in the AI supply chain, as well as in the digital work field, through upskilling and paid remote work opportunities. Our shared mission is to provide a diverse group of conflict-affected and displaced people with access to career development support, upskilling, and remote work opportunities to train and monitor AI systems. We are active across the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, and our work related opportunities are primarily focused on communities affected by armed conflict and are distributed with priority to countries where other remote online job opportunities are unavailable as for example Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon. In our additional partner countries Turkey, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Moldova, and the DRC, with upcoming pilots in Kenya and Uganda, we concentrate on upskilling opportunities, equipping people with freelance related skills and then further supporting them in applying for remote work on platforms such as UpWork through our Mictrofreelancing self-paced course. Our foundation has its own training platform where we conduct trainings in English, Digital Skills, as well as data annotation skills and remote work, and everything is available online. We have developed our own proprietary modules on topics such as bias in AI and ethical AI, Cybersecurity when working online, and data annotation techniques, as well as professional courses which are either instructor-led or self-paced on topics such as Digital Marketing, Intro to Programming, Intro to Graphic Design, or Intro to Business Analytics. To date, more than 500 individuals have completed courses on our platform. Now, we want to develop our course offerings further by developing new courses on generative AI skills and real-time monitoring of AI systems, performing red team testing on AI systems, and providing feedback for reinforcement learning. Many of our trainees are already working for our social enterprise as data annotators, working on projects related to image labelling, data collection, and real-time monitoring and edge case handling of AI systems. To date, we have provided paid remote employment to more than 1,100 people. Our goal is to ensure that they progress further in their careers in the AI field and to provide them with opportunities to access further employment on freelancing platforms, or with other employers. We have partnered before with Upwork's "Opportunity Unlimited" program in order to introduce them to online freelancing, and we also have a small-scale career counselling program. Now, our goal is to expand these career development programs in order to help our graduates join the workforce of the future and contribute to making AI systems more inclusive and mitigate harmful biases.