{"id":23098,"date":"2010-10-08T04:18:40","date_gmt":"2010-10-08T02:18:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=23098"},"modified":"2023-07-26T12:13:36","modified_gmt":"2023-07-26T09:13:36","slug":"amazons-mechanical-turk-fights-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/10\/08\/amazons-mechanical-turk-fights-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon’s Mechanical Turk fights back"},"content":{"rendered":"

Innovation: Online army turns the tide on automation<\/span><\/h3>\n

by\u00a0Gareth Morgan<\/strong><\/p>\n

Innovation<\/strong> is our regular column in which we highlight emerging technologies and predict where they may lead<\/em><\/p>\n

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Human help lies within (Image: Noriyuki Araki\/Flickr\/Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Computer automation can take jobs away from people but, thanks to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, humans are fighting back<\/strong>. AMT was inspired by the 18th-century inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen, who dazzled the Roman empress Maria Theresa with a <\/strong>chess-playing automaton<\/strong>. His secret: a human chess master hid inside the machine.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2005, online retailer Amazon <\/strong>developed a version<\/strong> that uses a human workforce “hidden” on the internet to solve problems \u2013 for a modest price.<\/strong> Typically, the work undertaken is for organisations that need a little human smarts applied to bulk tasks, such as\u00a0identifying objects in vast collections of images.<\/p>\n

An echo of von Kempelen’s Turk is found in the offices of robot maker\u00a0Willow Garage, in Menlo Park, California. Some of the firm’s free-roaming robots rely on humans through AMT to help\u00a0them get their bearings. Whenever one gets lost within the Willow Garage offices, it sends an image to AMT with a request for nearby objects to be identified, using the answers to establish its whereabouts.<\/p>\n

Get shorter<\/h3>\n

At the\u00a0User Interface Software and Technology symposium in New York City this week there are signs that AMT rivals computer automation on some tasks.<\/p>\n

Michael Bernstein<\/span> at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues, have developed\u00a0Soylent, an add-on for Microsoft Word that uses AMT workers to check language and grammar. In tests on text from Wikipedia entries, Word’s grammar checker picked up about a third of errors; Soylent spotted two-thirds.<\/p>\n

Solyent’s Shortn module tasks the online workers with shortening the text \u2013 to meet a word limit, for example. The Word add-on also boasts a macro-writing module, Human Macro, which lets a writer describe how they want to manipulate text \u2013 perhaps changing it into the past tense \u2013 without the complication of having to code their own set of instructions within Word.<\/p>\n

Say what you see<\/h3>\n

Meanwhile,\u00a0Jeffrey Bigham at the University of Rochester, New York, and colleagues, are using the image-analysis capabilities of AMT workers \u2013 predominantly based in the US and India \u2013 to help the visually impaired. They have created an iPhone app called\u00a0VizWiz that gets AMT workers to interpret objects in the user’s environment \u2013 checking the small use-by date on a carton of milk, for example.<\/p>\n

The app is able to analyse the iPhone camera’s focal length and lens distortion, and data from the built-in accelerometer, to pick out a target object in sufficient detail before sending it. After identification, the result is read aloud.<\/p>\n

However, despite their lack of real brain power, there is one advantage that computers will continue to hold over their AMT rivals: computers don’t\u00a0charge for their labour.<\/p>\n

References: Bernstein’s\u00a0Soylent research paper (pdf); Bigham’s\u00a0VizWiz research paper<\/span> (pdf)<\/p>\n

, 05 October 2010<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Innovation: Online army turns the tide on automation by\u00a0Gareth Morgan Innovation is our regular column in which we highlight emerging technologies and predict where they may lead Computer automation can take jobs away from people but, thanks to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, humans are fighting back. AMT was inspired by the 18th-century inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":23099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[846,845,922],"tags":[3841,3842,3845,3840,3846,3844,3843],"class_list":["post-23098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-scitech","category-world","tag-amazons-mechanical-turk","tag-amt","tag-hidden-chess-master","tag-mechanical-turk","tag-supervisory-control","tag-von-kempelens-turk","tag-wolfgang-von-kempelen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}