Datasets Working Group

Mission

Create new datasets to fuel innovation in machine learning.

Purpose

Datasets fuel machine learning: a model is only as good as the data it was trained upon. ImageNet, created for less than half a million dollars, arguably gave rise to modern machine learning. Unfortunately, most public datasets today are either small (relative to private commercial datasets), static, licensed for research use only, or some combination of those things. Datasets must be large to train accurate models. To stay relevant, datasets should be constantly improved as gaps in their coverage are identified. Lastly, datasets require a permissive public license to enable new businesses, products, and services globally.

The Datasets Working Group creates and hosts public datasets that are large, actively maintained, and permissively licensed - especially for commercial use. We aim to develop a center of expertise and supporting technologies that dramatically improves the quality and reduces the cost of new public datasets. We believe that a modest investment in public datasets can have impressive ROI in terms of machine learning innovation and market growth. The Datasets Working Group’s first project is the People’s Speech dataset, an open speech recognition dataset that is approximately 100x larger than existing open alternatives. We are currently validating the utility of the data in preparation for public release.

Deliverables

1. The People’s Speech Dataset v0.5 (100k hours of diverse speech)
2. The People’s Speech Dataset v1.0 (100k hours of speech in 1,000 languages)

Meeting Schedule

Weekly on Thursday from 11:05am-12:00pm Pacific.

How to Join and Access Working Group Resources

• To sign up for the group mailing list, receive the meeting invite, and access shared documents and meeting minutes:
  1. Associate a Google account with your organizational email address.
  2. Join the Datasets Google Group.
  3. Once you've joined the Datasets Google Group, you'll be able to access the Datasets folder in the Public Google Drive.
• To engage in group dicussions:
  1. Join the group's channels on the MLCommons Discord server.
• To access the GitHub repositories (public):
  1. If you want to contribute code, please sign our CLA first.
  2. Visit the GitHub repositories:
     • Croissant
     • Datasets Infra
     • Peoples Speech

Working Group Chairs

To contact all Datasets working group chairs email datasets-chairs@mlcommons.org.

Kurt Bollacker (kurt@mlcommons.org) - LinkedIn - Wikipedia

Kurt is the Digital Research Director of the Long Now Foundation. He has a research history in the areas of machine learning, search engines, graph databases, digital archiving, and cardiac simulation. He built the first prototype of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and created the computer science publication search engine CiteSeerX. He was one of the original creators of Freebase (now Google Knowledge Graph). He received a Ph.D. in computer engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.

Peter Mattson (peter@mlcommons.org) - LinkedIn

Peter Mattson leads ML Metrics at Google. He co-founded and is President of MLCommons®, and co-founded and was General Chair of the MLPerf consortium that preceded it. Previously, he founded the Programming Systems and Applications Group at NVIDIA Research, was VP of software infrastructure for Stream Processors Inc (SPI), and was a managing engineer at Reservoir Labs. His research focuses on understanding machine learning models and data through quantitative metrics and analysis. Peter holds a PhD and MS from Stanford University and a BS from the University of Washington.