Amazon Mechanical Turk (mis)uses

Introduction

Laymen explanation

Computer has great capability of computing and so, it is better than human being in this area. However, computer is poor in doing task like face recognition, handwriting recognition. Remember that many websites uses captcha to distinguish between machine and human being.

To solve such problems, computer and human being work together. Computer does following:

• Connect physically separated human beings

• Process result and present it in human readable form

Note that here problem is solved by human being, not the computer.

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is such computer solution. It enables individuals and businesses (known as Requesters) to coordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do.

Technical explanation

It is one of the sites of Amazon Web Services. Here, Employers are able to post jobs known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk's Terms of Service, or, more colloquially, Turkers) can then browse among existing jobs and complete them for a monetary payment set by the employer. To place jobs, the requesting programs use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site

Use

• Missing persons searches

Check if satellite data has missing person picture

• Processing photos / videos

Classify objects found in images by satellite

• Data verification

Identify duplicates and verify details of items entries.

Misuse

• Solving Captcha

• Influence google instant auto complete to add specific search suggestion.

Reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk

http://searchengineland.com/how-google-instant-autocomplete-suggestions-work-62592