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Amazon Mechanical Turk

Access a global, on-demand, 24x7 workforce

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually. This could include anything from conducting simple data validation and research to more subjective tasks like survey participation, content moderation, and more. MTurk enables companies to harness the collective intelligence, skills, and insights from a global workforce to streamline business processes, augment data collection and analysis, and accelerate machine learning development.

While technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as moderating content, performing data deduplication, or research. 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. Crowdsourcing is a good way to break down a manual, time-consuming project into smaller, more manageable tasks to be completed by distributed workers over the Internet (also known as ‘microtasks’).

Benefits

Optimize efficiency

MTurk is well-suited to take on simple and repetitive tasks in your workflows which need to be handled manually. Using MTurk to outsource microtasks ensures that work gets done quickly, while freeing up time and resources for the company – so internal staff can focus on higher value activities.

Increase flexibility

Scaling up and down a workforce isn’t the easiest undertaking. With access to a global, on-demand, 24x7 workforce, MTurk enables businesses and organizations to get work done easily and quickly when they need it – without the difficulty associated with dynamically scaling your in-house workforce.

Reduce cost

MTurk offers a way to effectively manage labor and overhead costs associated with hiring and managing a temporary workforce. By leveraging the skills of distributed Workers on a pay-per-task model, you can significantly lower costs while achieving results that might not have been possible with just a dedicated team.

How it works

MTurk offers developers access to a diverse, on-demand workforce through a flexible user interface or direct integration with a simple API. Organizations can harness the power of crowdsourcing via MTurk for a range of use cases, such as microwork, human insights, and machine learning development.

Use Cases

Building, managing, and evaluating Machine Learning workflows

MTurk can be a great way to minimize the costs and time required for each stage of ML development. It is easy to collect and annotate the massive amounts of data required for training machine learning (ML) models with MTurk. Building an efficient machine learning model also requires continuous iterations and corrections. Another usage of MTurk for ML development is human-in-the-loop (HITL), where human feedback is used to help validate and retrain your model. An example is drawing bounding boxes to build high-quality datasets for computer vision models, where the task might be too ambiguous for a purely mechanical solution and too vast for even a large team of human experts.

“At AI2, we're pushing the state of the art of Artificial Intelligence, which often requires human-annotated data to train new systems and measure our progress. In particular, we use crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk to build datasets that help our models learn common sense knowledge, which is often necessary to answer basic questions that are easy for humans but still quite hard for machines. Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a flexible platform that enables us to harness human knowledge to advance machine learning research.”

– Michael Schmitz, Director of Engineering, Allen Institute for AI

Business process outsourcing

A large, seemingly overwhelming task can sometimes be transformed into a set of smaller, more manageable microtasks that can each be accomplished independently. Crowdsourcing can be an efficient organizational strategy to harness innovation and agility by distributing work to Internet users. Businesses or developers can use MTurk to access thousands of on-demand workers—and then integrate the results of that work directly into their business processes and systems. Common examples include the moderation of web and social media content, categorization of products or images, and the collection of data from websites or other resources.

“The F&B industry has always operated at the mercy of changing tastes and preferences of consumers. Our goal is to surface consumer insights and spot emerging trends, so our clients can effectively respond with effective strategies. Workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk respond to our requests to gather information from menus, websites, and other channels. We are able to leverage these human collective insights to better understand customer needs and uncover important market trends.”

– David Falck, Executive Director, Food Genius / US Foods Data Science

Learn more about Amazon Mechanical Turk

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