Paper Reading #15 - TurKit: human computation algorithms on mechanical turk

References:
Greg Little, Lydia B. Chilton, Max Goldman, Robert C, Miller
UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology


Summary:
This paper is about software called TurKit. Mechanical Turk provides an on-demand source of human computation. This provides a tremendous opportunity to explore algorithms which incorporate human computation as a function call.  TurKit is a toolkit that provides a way of exploring human computation, while maintaining an imperative programming style.  The authors provide applications for human computation algorithms, and case studies where TurKit is used in real experiments.

Discussion:
Many companies use Mechanical Turk in their customer reviews today.  This relies on human computation rather than computer algorithms.  With this new system however, there may be a way to change the current systems to utilize TurKit.