Yes, Mechanical Turk is another platform that enables human computation work. We looked a lot at that in our early research. It does not, however, implement any internal quality control mechanisms, and it also only allows payment in US dollars, Indian rupees, or via Amazon gift card. The interface is also clunky and difficult for people with limited computer/internet experience to understand (too many windows within windows, basically).
So there are a number of reasons to sidestep Mechanical Turk.
Hi folks—long-time reader, first-time poster here. I’d like to share my new startup, formed over the past few months. In short, we use human computation to create employment opportunities in the developing world while enabling new types of data analysis for solving complex problems.
Some background and justification: extreme poverty is bad. I won’t say too much to justify this point, other than that human suffering and the lost potential for individuals to do great things are two of the big things that make it bad. And just to be clear, by “extreme poverty” I am referring to the “living on $1 per day” kind (though that’s a not a very good definition, it’s at least in the ballpark). One way to combat extreme poverty is by creating employment opportunities so that people can help themselves, rather than giving them free shoes, or corn, or wells, all of which are suboptimal for meeting their varied pressing needs. So our approach is to hire them to do human computation work.
Human computation is when people do things that are easy for people but hard for computers. A good example is image processing/recognition (this is why reCAPTCHA works). By combining the things people do well with the things computers (i.e. software we currently able to write) do well, we can enable new kinds of data analysis. For example, we can mine figures from the medical literature for depictions of biochemical pathways, recreate many of them together (molecules = nodes, interactions = edges), and create a more complete picture of our biology.
So that’s our approach: find an interesting, complex problem (so far they have been in the academic research world), collaborate with the domain experts to design human computation processes to enable the necessary data analysis and synthesis, and using our web platform, pay people in developing countries to do the work. Interesting problems get solved, we get paid, and people in Kenya get paid. Win, win, win.
Interested? We are looking for:
People with problems to solve using human computation. We are especially looking for domain experts here. Not sure if your problem is amenable to human computation? Let’s talk.
Programmers. We’ve got a platform now but are continually improving it. Python/django. There’s also a fair amount of cobbling together datasets for input and output that presents ever-changing challenges in many different languages.
Marketing/sales. Our concept is a hard thing to explain to people. People don’t seem to be used to thinking about solving problems in this manner, so it’s difficult to get people to think, “Oh yes! I have problem X and this will help me solve it!”. We need to figure out some way to communicate this better in order to expand the problems to work on and increase revenue.
Funding. We need to pay programmers, marketing people, and us.
Other! Think this is a cool idea but don’t fit into one of the above areas? Let’s talk!