Emma does her assignment on her little study table on a random day after work. Then, acting really curious, she leaves the table and sits beside you while you knit.
Emma: “Last Friday, you talked about a group of people worldwide doing tasks.”
You: “When was that?”
Emma: “We were detecting flowers. We had to label the images.”
You: “Oh yeah. Amazon Mechanical Turk.”
Emma: “I wanna know more about it. Sounds interesting.”
You: “Okay. In simple terms, it’s a platform provided by Amazon where you can give humans tasks to complete in exchange for money. So, they complete the tasks and they get paid.”
Emma: “Woah! Means I can have my own money?” She beams.
You: “Not yet. Not for 5-year-olds.”
Emma: (puts on a sad face). “But, how does it work?”
You: “Let’s use our example of labeling images we had last week. We put the task out there for human workers to label the images. This task is called a Human Intelligence Task, HIT.”
Emma: “And how do workers work on it?”
You: “They just find it on their profiles. They choose what tasks they can do, the rewards they get for achieving the task, and the requirements for working on it.”
Emma: “Requirements?”
You: “Yes. Like location and some other conditions. Sometimes, education.”
Emma: “That’s interesting. Are the prices the same for every task?”
You: “Of course not! Not every HIT is the same, so they should have different prices attached. The same goes for the allocated time. Some tasks are tougher than others and so should have higher prices.”
Emma: “Cool.”
You: “And, when you sign up for an account, your account needs review. when you first open your account, you get 100 points. As you achieve tasks, your points increase. The number of points is sometimes required to complete the task.”
Emma: “Are you an Amazon Mechanical Turk worker?”
You: “Yes. In my spare time, I complete tasks for some cash.”
Emma: (she beams) “Woah! That’s some cash you’ve got right there!”
You: “Oh yes, girl. Saving up to get you nice Christmas toys.”
She dances. You smile.
Emma: “When I grow up, I’ll be an Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker too!”
Who am I?
Hii! I’m Delia Ayoko. I’m an AWS Community Builder in the Machine Learning Category and the first Cloud Club Captain in Cameroon, at the University of Bamenda. I am also a computer engineering student, data scientist, content creator, Wattpad author, and mentor. I love building models, especially using AWS. If you loved this article, please react to it so that I write another one next week. Thank you!
P.S: If you’re looking forward to starting a career in machine learning, I have videos where I explain ML concepts on my Instagram. Feel free to check it out and follow me there for more content in your feed! 🙂
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