Product Updates [June 2023]

The heat is on 🔥 — recent summer scorchers and a fury of CVPR preparation and follow-ups have everyone at Encord both turning up and basking in the heat. We’re also excited to announce a bevy of other useful solutions — read on for more.

Introducing Encord Apollo and Encord Active — On Platform

We’re very excited to announce we’ve completed the groundwork in transitioning from an annotation platform to a complete ML data engine and software stack solution. Describe your problem with Encord Annotate — our annotation tooling and workflow solution. Validate and debug datasets in systematic, data-driven active learning cycles with Encord Active, now hosted on the platform for a more seamless experience. We’re starting with the ability to apply micro-models across your entire organization, and keep watching for the ability to fine-tune foundation models coming soon!

After its official launch on Product Hunt, where it was hunted by Michael Seibel, Encord Active is now available as a seamless hosted solution in Encord as well! Contact us to learn how to enable Active on the platform and incorporate active learning cycles into your daily workflow — including our new Search Anything Model for Encord Active, which allows you to search for images using natural language. Que wow.

New Workflow Templates and SDK Support

Our new workflow templates are here! Create templates of your most common workflows, and use them to create new projects with ease. The template editor lets you build and edit templates usable across any projects you create. Furthermore, add collaborators to templates, which means you setup not only common workflows but also common teams, and re-use them as necessary. After you’ve created the perfect template, select it during the project creation process in the app or the SDK (!) and you’re good to go.

"What if a template isn’t quite what I need for a particular project?"

Glad you asked! You can customize a selected template during project creation to suit your exact needs - see our documentation here to learn how to do this in just a few simple clicks.

Consensus coming soon to Encord Workflows

We are pleased to announce that Encord Workflows will soon include a highly requested Consensus stage in the new workflow composer. Details of a useful consensus calculation can vary depending on the labeling task and data modality. With your needs in mind, we are actively engaged in prototyping various consensus setups, and would like your input. At the same time, the design teams are working on the details on the look and feel integrating consensus into workflow, as shown in the sneak peek below ⤵️. We would love your input in developing the most useful consensus comparisons and the appropriate integration into annotation workflows. Get in touch at product@encord.com to get early access and be a part of the process!

Collaborator timings available through the SDK

Welcome to the first stage in accessing your analytics in a scalable, programmatic manner. Access collaborator session information programatically using the SDK to provide you valuable insights into the duration your project collaborators spend on a given task. Using the SDK to monitor annotations makes it easy to analyse and process thousands of records by giving you direct access with just a few simple lines of code. Accessing analytics via the SDK will only get easier from this point forward!

Keen to learn more? Check out our SDK documentation here.

DICOM Updates

We’re excited to announce the launch of our sharing and deep-linking feature in our DICOM editor! Sharing a URL will now guide users to a specific image or slice within the project, making collaboration easier than ever before! More big news — you can now rotate DICOM files to seamlessly manipulate the orientation of medical images, including CT scans, MRIs, and Mammograms, with just a few clicks. By enabling easy rotation of DICOM volumes, we're helping you enhance visualisation, make better annotations, and make more informed decisions. Catch up on all the DICOM news in this months DICOM update blog, here.

Did you know? 

High-quality datasets require accurate labels, but fixing multiple labels can be tedious and long-winded - if you’re not using our bulk label operations! Make effortless changes to multiple annotations in the label editor at the same time to merge multiple instance labels into a single instance, or efficiently delete labels in bulk. 

Around the world and around the web

Brace for impact! The EU AI Act is hitting the stage with the world's first-ever legislation on artificial intelligence. Imagine GDPR but for AI. Technical definitions for foundation models and general purpose AI are as varied as their practitioners — the EU is undertaking a large task leapfrogging ahead to set legal definitions. Stay ahead of the game by joining our webinar on the 12th of July. The panel will cover the most important Articles and answer any questions regarding the AI Act ➡️ Sign up here

Regulators are turning up the heat, but so are innovators. The competition for building the best models has intensified from open source teams to Meta AI and Google DeepMind. Fear not, our machine learning team is here to provide a quick overview and summary of the latest models for you.

💡Find out more with Encord’s guides on these models:

TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinement

Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once

Meta AI’s I-JEPA, Image-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture

If you have any feedback, ideas, or suggestions that you would like to share, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. We would love to hear from you!