The Mechanical Turk Blog

Mechanical Turk in the Bay Area this week

I'll be talking about Mechanical Turk at 2 events in the Bay Area this week.

Wednesday November 9th, I'll be at the Sentiment Symposium discussing how companies are using Mechanical Turk to accurately characterize sentiment in social media. 

On Thursday November 10th, I'll be at Xerox PARC participating in a panel on Crowdsourcing: From Phenomenon to Business Model. 

Hope to see some of you at these events.

--Sharon

 

Fixing Dirty Data with Mechanical Turk – Werner Vogel’s Keynote @ Strata

A few weeks ago, I attended the O’Reilly Strata conference where Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, gave a keynote.  He spoke about big data – how to collect, store, organize, analyze and share data. In his talk (at minute 13:04) he covered how enterprises are using Mechanical Turk to organize their data. Specifically, how you can leverage the hundreds of thousands Workers on Mechanical Turk to: 

• Verify your data
• Correct data
• Enrich data by adding meta information to your data set
• Filter data through content moderation

He then shared a common case study of how a company managing millions of business listings incorporated Mechanical Turk into their data management workflow to optimize the accuracy of their data and improve their customer experience. In the scenario he described, the provider of business listings built a data processing engine that automatically sent data exceptions to Mechanical Turk. These exceptions were reviewed and corrected by Workers; their answers were automatically validated, placed back in the data flow and then updated on their website:

You can see all of the keynotes with transcripts on the O’Reilly summary page – click on the purple icon
( ) to read the transcript.  
Thanks to Mechanical Turk partners   and  who  provided the transcriptions for the conference!  Here’s the transcript from Werner’s presentation.

 

-- Natala

 

Net:Work Conference Recap

Last week Sharon Chiarella, VP Mechanical Turk and I attended the GigaOm Net:Work Future of Work conference in San Francisco. These events are so awesome – it is great to spend time with the Crowdsourcing community, our customers and partners. We hear such useful and insightful feedback. 

Sharon participated on The Human Cloud: Elastic Workforce in the Enterprise panel along with Alex Edelstein, CEO of CloudCrowd, Maynard Web, CEO of LiveOps and Doron Reuveni, CEO of uTest and was moderated by Niel Robertson, CEO of Trada. 

The panel was asked to provide insight into the value of labor-as-a-service within the Enterprise, the impact of Cloud-based labor on outsourcing and how the category has changed over the last few years.

Some key highlights: 

• Platforms like Mechanical Turk are speeding up the pace of innovation by allowing businesses to get work done more quickly and scale up and down with an on-demand labor pool as their needs change. 
• Anonymity of Workers was discussed. Alex Edelstein had a great parallel about the importance of a Workers identity – do you need to know who installed the steering wheel in your car to know if the work that was done was high quality? Sharon agreed that it is not an individual’s identity that’s important but the quality of their work. 

Watch the video below to get the full details from the panel. Thanks to GigaOm for hosting such a great event – we were glad to be a part of it! 

-- Natala