AI Excellence Award overview
We have some exciting news! Today, the Business Intelligence Group announced that FiftyOne, Voxel51’s open source computer vision platform, was named a winner in its 2024 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards! 🏆
This business awards program sets out to recognize people, products, and organizations leveraging AI technology to solve real-world problems. We nominated FiftyOne for the first time this year, and we’re thrilled and honored to have been recognized as a standout AI solution!
If you’re not yet familiar, here’s a brief introduction to the award-winning FiftyOne computer vision platform and the Business Intelligence Group, the organization behind this prestigious industry award:
- FiftyOne is a computer vision platform that provides AI builders with a comprehensive suite of capabilities to efficiently and systematically analyze and optimize their datasets and models.
- The Business Intelligence Group was founded with the mission of recognizing true talent and superior performance in the business world. Unlike other industry award programs, these programs are judged by business executives having experience and knowledge. The organization’s proprietary and unique scoring system selectively measures performance across multiple business domains and then rewards those companies whose achievements stand above those of their peers.
We learned of the AI Excellence Award from past winners and were inspired to nominate FiftyOne this year. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look into some of the supporting documentation we provided during the nomination process, and why we believe FiftyOne was recognized as an award-winning computer vision AI solution.
What is the FiftyOne computer vision platform all about?
Models are only as good as the data they’re trained on. FiftyOne is the leading open source toolkit for building high quality datasets and cutting-edge computer vision models. Powering some of today’s most remarkable machine learning and artificial intelligence, FiftyOne sits at the heart of AI work. Data scientists and machine learning engineers use FiftyOne to visualize, augment, manage, and QA data, streamline machine learning workflows, and get to production faster.
As a mission-critical component in the AI/ML stack, people choose FiftyOne because it:
- Supports all popular computer vision tasks including classification, detection, instance segmentations, semantic segmentation, polygons and polylines, keypoints, point clouds, annotations, embeddings, and more
- Is multimodal, supporting image, video, 3D, and geolocation data
- Serves AI teams in any industry, including agriculture, automotive, aviation, defense, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, robotics, security, sports, and transportation
- Streamlines and automates dozens of AI workflows including data management, training data selection, annotation tasks, synthetic data validation, model evaluation, and model selection
- Integrates naturally with other tools needed to build and deploy production-grade AI solutions
- Is backed by a thriving and enthusiastic open source community
Since its launch in late 2020, the open source FiftyOne project has experienced incredible growth to nearly 2 million downloads, more than 6,500 stars on GitHub, and more than 2,600 members in the FiftyOne Community Slack.
What makes FiftyOne unique?
A defining characteristic that makes FiftyOne unique is the large, enthusiastic open source community supporting it. For example, from February 2023 to February 2024, there were ~18 new releases of FiftyOne, each delivering a number of powerful community-driven features. Over that period, FiftyOne saw tremendous adoption across the AI community, with 220% growth in downloads, 157% growth in GitHub stars, and 84% growth in Community Slack membership.
Because machine learning is a fast-moving field that spans every industry, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach for every AI project. That is why another unique characteristic of FiftyOne is that it was designed with built-in flexibility and extensibility. FiftyOne provides the building blocks AI teams need to optimize their data pipelines and streamline machine learning workflows. Tens of thousands of engineers and scientists use it daily to visualize complex labels, evaluate models, explore scenarios of interest, identify failure modes, improve annotations, and accomplish a variety of other essential ML tasks. In addition, FiftyOne integrates naturally with other tools, providing a seamless experience across the ML lifecycle. Finally, FiftyOne provides a powerful plugin framework that allows users to extend and customize the functionality to suit their specific needs – the possibilities are endless!
Is there a challenge that FiftyOne has faced and overcome in the past year?
The rise of ChatGPT and LLMs in the past year impacted businesses and technologies of all kinds. Voxel51 embraced the AI chatbot revolution by building VoxelGPT, an open source plugin for FiftyOne that combines the power of GPT with FiftyOne’s computer vision query language, making it possible for users to filter, sort, and semantically slice data using natural language.
Want to surface interesting insights about your image and video datasets without writing code? Simply ask VoxelGPT to search your image, video, and 3D point cloud data to find what you’re looking for, no matter how complex the request. In addition, VoxelGPT has access to the entire collection of FiftyOne documentation, including tutorials, user guides, and API docs, making it easy to get instant answers to your questions as you work. Have complex machine learning questions? VoxelGPT can answer questions about computer vision, machine learning, and data science, too.
FiftyOne developers are always looking for ways to make the open source computer vision toolkit more flexible, customizable, and extensible than ever. A significant engineering milestone in the past year was the addition of a new feature called Operators to FiftyOne’s Plugin framework in the 0.21 release. In addition to being a useful AI assistant for computer vision tasks, VoxelGPT was also the first plugin built using the Operators feature. This simple, yet powerful feature unlocked limitless possibilities for anyone to customize their FiftyOne experience exactly the way they want.
