Mechanical Turk

OpenSurfaces contains a complete generic pipeline for running experiments on Mechanical Turk.

It includes features such as:

  • API: abstraction of the MTurk API into clean python functions.
  • Admin interface: view submissions are they arrive, worker feedback, assignment statistics, experiment lists, scheduling info, task/tutorial previews.
  • Pipeline: scheduler for sorting and batching items together, filtering and regrouping results, and then feeding the output of one task as the input of another task.
  • Task tutorials: MTurk HITs can start with a mandatory tutorial that must be completed before any work is done.
  • Sentinel quality management: each task can be supplemented with secret items with known answers. Users that perform poorly are banned (locally, not flagged on MTurk).
  • Dynamic generation of examples to show each user different subsets of a large database of examples.
  • Feedback: survey to gather thoughts from workers.
  • CUBAM: machine learning model for automatically modeling the competence and bias of workers, for tasks with binary answers (as described in Welinder P., Branson S., Belongie S., Perona, P. “The Multidimensional Wisdom of Crowds.” Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2010).
  • UI: MTurk interfaces for segmentation, object/material/scene labeling, BRDF appearance matching, 3D surface normal, binary quality filtering, point filtering, relative point comparisons.

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