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 :-
1. 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.
2. Increase flexibility
Scaling up and down a workforce isn’t the easiest undertaking. With access to a global, on-demand, 24×7 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.
3. 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.
