Title: TurKit: human computation algorithms on mechanical turk
Authors: Greg Little, Lydia B. Chilton, Max Goldman, Robert C. Miller
Venue: UIST '10: Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Summary
This paper is about the integration of human computation into projects. As described in the article, Mechanical Turk is an on-demand source of human computation. People in third world countries are paid to work by answering queries relating to text recognition and CAPTCHA. The solution is implemented as a JavaScript that can be called by other programs, similar to how a library works. The system has already been used for a number of applications, including various psychological research.
Discussion
I liked this idea, even if it was a bit unorthodox. I don't see a huge amount of application for this however beyond research and text recognition. There aren't a whole lot of tasks that computers are unable to preform that are easy for your average person to preform.
I have seen a number of applications using this Turk human computing platform since taking this class. Very strange. There have been a few occasions where I can actually see the benefit of using such a system, such as a proofreading system that I read about a while back, but you are right when you say there are many things that could simply be done by the computer.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of you. There arnt that many things this can be used for that would be greatly beneficial. Its nice for research though.
ReplyDelete