What's with the Label Studio Opossums?

You might have wondered what creature is walking around when a page loads in Label Studio. We have an opossum as our mascot!

Today, we want to introduce you all to Heidi.

Why we care about opossums

Opossums are scrappy marsupials, opportunistic omnivores that take their food where they can find it. If you have a neglected fruit tree, any rotten fruit that falls to the ground is like a gift to an opossum. They can be helpful to gardeners, eating snails, slugs, snakes, and insects that might munch on your precious plants.

Opossums also eat ticks, helping to reduce the numbers of ticks that could latch onto pets, animals, or humans and thereby reduce the spread of Lyme disease.

Sadly, opossums only live about 1-2 years in the wild, or up to 4 years in captivity.

Opossums are a frequently overlooked part of the ecosystem, and people often see them as a nuisance. However, they're just looking for food anywhere they can find it. If left undisturbed, they move on pretty quickly.

Mostly, we think they're underappreciated and adorable.

What does data labeling have to do with opossums?

Ultimately, they're both necessary nuisances. Data labeling is a crucial but tedious part of a machine learning pipeline. It can take time to label data and do it well, but it's essential for high quality machine learning models.

Opossums can live just about anywhere. And so can Label Studio! You can install Label Studio on Linux, Windows, or Mac devices. However, unlike opossums, Label Studio works best in a clean environment, like a Docker container or a virtual environment.

Just like opossums, Label Studio is flexible about what it ingests. You can start a data labeling project with text samples, audio clips, images, HTML documents, or videos. You can also import structured data formats like CSV or TSV files of time series data, or use JSON to combine multiple data types into one labeling task.

Opossums are short-lived, and so is your labeled data. Make sure that you update your datasets and retrain your models to prevent data drift and account for concept drift over time.

Add Label Studio to your machine learning pipeline and make data labeling easier and more efficient. Try it today!