Meet our annotators: HITL Stars

Wondering who is annotating your data?

When you are hiring a company to help you with your annotation needs, you frequently never meet the workers who are labeling your data. We want to change this and present to you the inspiring stories of our annotators!

This article features 4 stories from our HITL Stars: the participants in the 1st cohort of our newest Career Development program in Bulgaria. The first two cohorts of the program are women-only and consist of English and Digital Skills trainings, priority access to work, and individual career counselling so that the participants can achieve their professional goals.

Sara’s story

Sara is from Afghanistan and has two children. For more than four years she’s been living in Sofia, Bulgaria with the legal status of a refugee. Her younger child has a health condition which requires her to stay at home and take care of him.

Sara was one of Humans in the Loop’s earliest workers, joining the company in July 2018. Since then, she has worked on more than 25 different annotation projects. In addition to HITL Stars, she is taking part in 2 other courses, one for IT skills and another one for learning Bulgarian.

“Working in Humans In The Loop has given me an opportunity — to work from home and to take care of my children.”

Sara is grateful to be living in Bulgaria because she says it feels normal and because the Bulgarian government has really helped financially for her son’s condition. As a single mother, the challenge she’s facing is to manage working and taking care of her kids. For the future she’s hoping to have Bulgarian citizenship in a couple of years and then to get her diving license and to have her own catering business for Afghan food.

Yalda’s story

Yalda is 18 years old and three years ago she moved to Bulgaria from Iran together with her family. She heard about HITL through the humanitarian organization Caritas and shortly afterwards she joined HITL Stars.

Since she started working for HITL she has learned a lot about the world of data labeling which she knew nothing about before that. So far she has worked on 2 projects and she shares that the work is not hard but some projects require more focus and time. She strives to be as fast as possible and she appreciates being able to work from home.

“The work in HITL has made me feel independent, I learned to believe in myself.”

Her family was financially stable back in Iran but when they started the process of moving to Bulgaria so many things happened that made her realize that money is not something constant. The life she’s living now is opening her eyes in ways she didn’t believe and she’s grateful for that because she’s learning new things every day.

Zukaa’s story

Zukaa is 58 years old and comes from Syria. She moved in Bulgaria six years ago with her family and she currently resides in the country with a refugee status.

She started working for Humans in the Loop one year ago and annotation work is currently her only source of income. When she joined HITL Stars, her level was a bit lower than the rest of the group but through a lot of hard work she is managing to achieve great results both in English and in digital skills.

“HITL Stars has helped me with my English and IT skills. It’s a challenge, but I’m getting better with every day.”

Zukaa has experience as an artist and she shares that painting is her way of remembering the life she used to have back home. Today, she tries to focus on the good things and she shares that in Bulgaria life is easier and she finds the safety that Syria lacks. She is grateful that she has her family close to her and she hopes that in the future everything stays calm.

Ghazaleh’s story

Ghalazeh is 21 years old and comes from Iran (and is Yalda’s older sister!). Currently she’s studying Computer Engineering at the Technical University in Sofia and she is in her sophomore year.

Ghazaleh defines herself as very success-driven and for the future she wants to have a better skillset in the field of computer engineering so that she can secure work in a big IT company. Hopefully her experience at Humans in the Loop will be a positive factor for that.

“I like the atmosphere of the company and that I’m working from home and I can schedule my time.”

She likes Bulgaria and the nature reminds her of her hometown. She finds the people kind and helpful. The only challenge that she is facing is that her visa is putting her in a position where she must find work. But she says that in the end this challenge is good for her and she and her family are planning to stay in Bulgaria.