Samasource Expands Product Team With Strategic New Hire; Announces Research & Development Team Growth

Samasource, the leader in providing secure, high-quality training data and model validation for AI technologies, announced the addition of Duncan Curtis to its leadership team as Vice President of Product, along with the exponential growth of its new AI Research and Development Center in Montréal, Canada. Curtis joins the company amid this expansion to further drive Samasource’s technology vision and strategy.

As Vice President of Product at Samasource, Curtis brings nearly 15 years of experience in product development, most recently acting as product management lead for autonomous vehicle startup, Zoox. In addition, during his time at Google, Curtis impacted the gaming experiences of over 1 billion daily active users with his work on Google Play Games. Now as the product leader at Samasource, Curtis leverages his expertise in computer vision and autonomous vehicles to supercharge the SamaHub annotation platform with deeper incorporation of machine learning.

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“It’s important to me that I use my career to make a positive impact on the world,” says Curtis. “Samasource does this in a number of ways – by building machine learning technologies that support changing the world, such as autonomous vehicles, and enabling world-class labeling, such as Sensor Fusion and automatic quality assurance, and by pioneering impact sourcing in East Africa with amazing opportunities for fair pay and transferable technical skills.”

The expansion of Samasource’s senior product team comes alongside significant growth in the company’s research and development organization. In 2018, Montréal’s technology job growth surpassed that of key markets including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York City, with Statistics Canada reporting a 9% increase in high-tech sector jobs. Samasource recently expanded its global footprint with the launch of its AI Development Center in Montréal, Canada’s growing tech hub.

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“As Samasource pursues global expansion in the world’s leading AI technology markets, we’re excited to welcome Duncan to the team and take part in Montréal’s promising future as a force in innovation,” said Wendy Gonzalez, interim CEO of Samasource. “It’s been incredibly inspiring to see that both our innovative technology vision and impact mission continue to attract top researchers, developers, and product talent.”

Samasource has significantly accelerated its growth enterprises in the past year as seen with the construction of a new delivery center in Kampala, the appointment of a new Head of AI Research & Development, Frédéric Ratle, and the announcement of a $14.8M Series A funding raise in November. The company’s commitment to propel the development and adoption of AI forward has also driven partnerships with Mila artificial intelligence institute in Québec and the Partnership on AI in San Francisco. The team at Samasource continues this growth trajectory in 2020, as it advances its AI platform and grows its talent pool to deliver the highest quality training data possible.

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