Title: Research Directions Amazon Mechanical Turk (including a particular environment design application, too)

Abstract:

Abstract: Amazon Mechanical Turk is a crowd-sourcing marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. There are over 10,000 tasks available daily and over 100,000 workers in the system. The marketplace allows for a large variety of tasks to be done quickly and cheaply, and has captured the attention of researchers looking to perform large-scale human experiments on the web. In this talk, I will start with an overview of how the system works and survey examples of research that has been conducted on or using the system. I will then talk about our current work, which aims to apply environment design techniques to automatically design Turk tasks to achieve specified goals. For the rest of the session I'd like to have a general discussion about possible research directions on the Turk platform, in particular at the intersection of economics and computer science.

This is joint work with Eric Huang, Krzysztof Gajos, Yiling Chen, and David Parkes.