Amazon Turk for Intelligence Analysis

Interesting activities on Amazon Turk, as seen in this email I got from Amazon. It’s easy to image the utility of Amazon Turk in the analysis of satellite imagery of possible terrorist hideouts (“review these images and indicate if there is a truck in the picture”). Adding a prediction market element, you can show photos of houses and ask “does a terrorist live here?”.

A number of you have asked us to make it easier for you to be kept up to date on Amazon Mechanical Turk. This email is a way for us to share with you what’s happening.Currently, there is a large selection of HITs available on the site, and the mix of tasks changes frequently. Here is a small sample, but we encourage you to visit the site and see what else is available.

Information Locators — Identify and transcribe information from digital documents for Information Locators. To complete these HITs, find and transcribe the requested data from online digital documents.

Dimensional Analytics — Describe the contents of a website for Dimensional Analytics. These HITs ask you to provide the top 3 phrases that best describe a website.

Geospatial Vision — Identify and mark items in photographs such as road signs, lamp posts, storm drains and other features for Geospatial Vision using their custom Flash application.

Collectorz.com — Write a short plot description for movies you have watched. Collectorz.com offers several movie titles that you can choose from to write your own plot description.

Trivia Research Department — Create and edit trivia questions for Trivia Research. To complete these HITs, reseach, write and edit trivia questions in different categories using your own knowledge and other resources.

Amazon UnSpun — Express your opinion by ranking your top three choices in various list categories. This information is used by Amazon’s UnSpun website to populate its community opinion lists on a wide variety of topics.

CastingWords — Transcribe audio content and edit transcripts . CastingWords’ HITs ask you to complete such diverse tasks as transcribing audio content into text, editing transcripts for accuracy and verifying transcription quality.

There’s a lot of activity on Mechanical Turk, so the list of available HITs changes frequently. The best way to stay up to date is to check the site when you have a free minute.