Adding Human Intelligence to Software

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed TurKit, a toolkit that enables users to write algorithms to coordinate online workers using Javascript and create human intelligence-equipped applications. "This is a bridge for writing code that interacts with the workers on Mechanical Turk, so we can easily explore new methods of human computation," says MIT's Greg Little.

TurKit acts as a backup data storage system in case the software under development crashes. "If you wait an hour for the humans to finish their task, and then the program throws an error, you don't want to wait another hour just to see if your bug fix works," Little says.

MIT's Michael Bernstein used TurKit to create a word-processing application called Soylent, which uses small groups of remote human workers, or turkers, to do on-demand proofreading and paragraph shortening in Microsoft Word. Another Mechanical Turk application, called VizWiz, enables blind users to identify objects using their smartphone cameras and sighted turkers.

University of Rochester computer scientist Jeffrey Bigham used TurKit to create quikTurkit, an algorithm that reduces lag time by queuing up groups of turkers before they are needed.

From Technology Review
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