“I want to support people who had to leave their homes and lost their jobs.”
Iva Gumnishka is the driving force behind Humans in the Loop, a social enterprise providing remote job opportunities in data annotation for people from conflict-affected regions.
A successful symbiosis of a non-profit foundation and a commercial company, Humans in the Loop has been promoting fair working conditions and ethical AI in Iva’s native Bulgaria and across the globe.
Iva won the Aurora Tech Award for restoring faith in people who are still behind artificial intelligence technologies.
Iva Gumnishka’s Principles
I studied human rights at university, and my focus has always been on supporting vulnerable groups. I really wanted to do something for refugees in my home country of Bulgaria. After graduating, I returned home and created Humans in the Loop. That was back in 2017. And this is how it all began.
I decided to work with refugees and asylum seekers because back in 2016 and 2017 it was a really big issue internationally, mainly because of the mass displacements of Syrian and Afghan people. Protracted conflicts affect people's lives. I wanted to find some kind of solution to support people who had to leave their homes and lost their jobs.
About Humans in the Loop
Working with NGOs across the globe, we agree on a strategy that would help us include an equal number of women and men. We guarantee that we pay decent wages. We provide training to our employees, teaching them how to do labeling, because it’s very important to avoid bias and harmful stereotypes.
For us, it was a strategic decision to have two different entities within the company: a non-profit foundation and a for-profit business. We have two separate budgets but still work as a single team. Sometimes calibration is needed to sync the two, but so far we’ve been working smoothly as a single organization.
Helping our students get a job after completing the courses is our ideal scenario. We have recently launched new programs for career support. We have career counseling activities, as well as courses to help people create a LinkedIn profile and start applying for jobs online. We also have a new referral project where we directly recommend people to potential employers.
About women in IT
Surprisingly, there are quite a few women working in the IT sector in Bulgaria. We are actually one of the countries in Europe with the highest representation of women in IT, due to the long-standing educational tradition in mathematics, science, and technology. But it’s also thanks to the outsourcing sector and the fact that these jobs are accessible to women as well.
I hope that people see me as a kind of role model inspiring other women to work in IT. Humans in the Loop is a team of 15 people, 10 of whom are women. We are definitely helping to create a more female-friendly environment for women entrepreneurs in the startup community, because we don’t usually have so many women in business.
What it's like to be a young women founder
When I launched Humans in the Loop back in 2017, I was really young and inexperienced. This is something that people notice. I didn’t have much expertise nor did I have any connections. But, as a woman entrepreneur, I have never faced any discrimination or negative attitude towards me.
Being quite young, I’ve always hired people who are much older than me. And most people on our team are still older than me right now. This could also be a lesson in humility for many people when they have to recognize that, okay, she may be younger than me, but she knows her stuff, so it’s worth listening to her and working with her.
I’m not famous in Bulgaria, not at all. I may be well-known in the startup sphere, but I usually try to keep away from mass media. Not least because we work with refugees, which some people may think of as a sensitive subject. Some may not like it. And I’m not trying to change public opinion on refugees, I’m just trying to do my job - and do it well.
Sometimes, when you’re an entrepreneur, it feels like every aspect of your life is dedicated to your company. But I really enjoy disconnecting from work and doing other things, and being part of other communities where people just love me for who I am. We have fun together without me being Iva the entrepreneur.
About the future
I haven’t decided yet what to do with the prize money. We’ll probably invest it in some new projects to develop our own technology. We’re currently trying to develop our own platform, so most likely it will go into research and development that will enable us to help more people in the future.
We are going to continue scaling our work globally. This is something that I’m really interested in, because it will also help us create even more diversity among our workforce, and contribute to building more diverse AI systems through diverse human input. We are currently working on our pilot project in the DRC. We are also expanding our operations in Europe and planning a new expansion into South-East Asia.
My professional dream is to stick with Humans in the Loop and see how big the company grows. Hopefully, we will eventually reach a stage where we are a mature organization making a huge social impact.
