Yandex, the Russia-based search-engine has launched the very first free online data labelling course on the learning platform - Coursera. The NASDAQ-listed company said that the course was designed to address the lacune in talent as in comparison to the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in businesses. Apart from the search engine, Yandex has over 70 internet-related products and services. 

The course - Practical Crowdsourcing for Efficient Machine Learning- has been released on Coursera on 15 March'21. The course will be imparted by working professionals from Toloka, Yandex's crowdsourcing data labelling platform. The platform will share real-life working case-studies for labelling and processing data, helping learners to gain a practical, real-time understanding of crowdsourcing concepts and launch their own projects in the time of the 5-week-long course. 

Since AI builds knowledge and intelligence on labelled data, such as text or image classification or checking audio transcriptions, the demand for third-party data labelling is forecast to surpass $1 billion by 2023, a massive jump from the $150 million market size in 2018. The need for crowdsourced solutions only seems to be growing in the future as there is currently a gap in the market for scalable, cost-efficient and high-quality data-labelling processes. 

Commenting on this new launch, Olga Megorskaya, the CEO of Toloka, said, "As the pandemic accelerates digital adoption and fuels the demand for tech talent, mastering crowdsourcing technologies can give individuals and businesses the required competitive edge. This new course will enable students to apply the theory they learn to real-life machine learning tasks and projects."

The course, in parts, has already been presented as successful workshops and tutorials internationally at several machine learning and data management events. 

To take this course, the learner needs to not have any background knowledge. However, the course will be useful for professionals like ML developers, data analysts, researchers, and students, who are just considering these careers.