What’s the project?

Whether you need help gathering data, labeling machine learning training examples, running experiments, or transcribing audio, today we use crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com). However, these platforms are notoriously bad at ensuring high quality results, producing respect and fair wages for workers, and making it easy to author effective tasks. It’s not hard to imagine that we could do better.

This research will be a complete design, implementation, launch, and evaluation of a new crowdsourcing platform. What would it take to create an effective marketplace? One where workers have more power in the employment relationship, or could take additional responsibility for the result quality? How might we design such a market? Could we launch it and become the new standard? This research in human-computer interaction will involve a combination of design thinking, web development, and experimental design.

This is far more ambitious than your typical project. It’s an entire marketplace design question. Thus, we’re banding together to solve it.

What might my contributions lead to?

Well, first, there’s creating a crowdsourcing market that becomes the new standard. This could lead to a far better future for crowdsourcing and crowd work, and millions of people could eventually use it. It’s research, of course, so there’s always risk it might not work out — but if we knew it would work, it wouldn’t be research!

Second, we’ll be planning papers to top-tier conferences based on our work. If you are considering an MS or especially a PhD program, being a heavily contributing author on a paper can greatly improve your chances. How much you contribute to the project will determine author order.

Last, I really do hope to build relationships with a diverse range of researchers. Join our team.