Amazon Mechanical Turk Service

An Amazon Mechanical Turk Service is web human-level intelligence piece work freelancing service (a crowdworking service for human-level intelligence micro-tasks) operated by the Amazon's mturk business unit.

• AKA: mturk.
• Context:
  • It can allow mturk Requesters to post mturk HITs.
  • It can allow mturk Workers to solve mturk HITs.
  • It can be accessed through mturk's UI, mturk's API, and mturk's CLI[1].
  • It can support Crowdsourcing Services, such as Soylent.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • mturk, 2015, with an average of 1,278 accounts posting jobs each day.
  • mturk, 2017.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • AWS SageMaker Ground Truth.
  • Microsoft's Universal Human Relevance System (UHRS).
  • Google's EWOK.
  • CrowdFlower.com Service.
  • Guru.com Service.
  • UpWork.com Service.
• See: Human Intelligence Task, Wiki-based System, Freelancing Marketplace, Amazon AWS.

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References

• http://www.mturk.com/mturk/
• http://mechanicalturk.typepad.com/blog/

2016

• http://techrepublic.com/article/inside-amazons-clickworker-platform-how-half-a-million-people-are-training-ai-for-pennies-per-task/
  • QUOTE: In 2001, Amazon, looking for new ways to more efficiently organize products on its rapidly growing store and solve difficult inventory problems that lay beyond the ability of computers, patented a hybrid machine/human system. Four years later, Amazon realized its goal of building a digital platform to provide on-demand access to the huge pool of labor available online, with the launch of Amazon Mechanical Turk. Being able to tap into Amazon's pool of "artificial artificial intelligence" — Amazon's description of Mechanical Turk's USP — appealed to a broad range of companies, everyone from online retailers to porn sites looking for affordable ways to sort their products, particularly at the low price for which Turkers would carry out microtasks. In 2015, an average of 1,278 people or organizations were posting jobs to Amazon Mechanical Turk each day.

2014

• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSMechTurk/latest/AWSMturkAPI/Welcome.html
  • QUOTE: … Amazon Mechanical Turk is a web service that provides an on-demand, scalable, human workforce to complete jobs that humans can do better than computers, for example, recognizing objects in photos.

2013

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
  • The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables computer programmers (known as Requesters) to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. It is one of the sites of Amazon Web Services. The Requesters are able to post tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a store-front, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk's Terms of Service, or, more colloquially, Turkers) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the more limited MTurk Requester site. Requesters are restricted to US-based entities.

    Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker's reputation. Currently, Workers can have an address anywhere in the world. Payments for completing tasks can be redeemed on Amazon.com via gift certificate (gift certificates are the only payment option available to international workers, apart from India) or be later transferred to a Worker's U.S. bank account. Requesters, which are typically businesses, pay 10 percent of the price of successfully completed HITs to Amazon.

2013b

• https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=overview#what_is
  • Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives Workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it's convenient.

     Amazon Mechanical Turk is based on the idea that there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings, or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.

2013c

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work#Work_settings
  • …Crowdsourcing systems such as Mechanical Turk involve minute information-processing tasks (such as identifying photos or recognizing signatures) for which workers are compensated on a per-task basis.

2013d

• (Melli, 2013-12-03) ⇒ Gabor Mell. (2013-12-03). “sing Amazon Mechanical Turk for Product Term Annotation.” “File:AmazonMechTurk-forProductTermAnnotation.131113.pptx.” Presentation.

2010a

• (Callison-Burch & Dredze, 2010) ⇒ Chris Callison-Burch, and Mark Dredze. (2010). “Creating Speech and Language Data with Amazon's Mechanical Turk.” In: Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data with Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

2010b

• (Paolacci et al., 2010) ⇒ Gabriele Paolacci, Jesse Chandler, and Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis. (2010). “Running Experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk.” In: Judgment and Decision making Journal, 5(5).

2008

• (Snow et al., 2008) ⇒ Rion Snow, Brendan O'Connor, Daniel Jurafsky, and Andrew Y. Ng. (2008). “Cheap and Fast - But is it Good?: Evaluating non-expert annotations for natural language tasks.” In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2008).

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