Amazon Mechanical Turk Cheat Sheet

• A forum where Requesters post work as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). Workers complete HITs in exchange for a reward. Essentially crowdsourcing.
• You write, test, and publish your HIT using the Mechanical Turk developer sandbox, Amazon Mechanical Turk APIs, and AWS SDKs.
• Benefits
  • Optimize efficiency since MTurk is well-suited to take on simple and repetitive tasks in your workflows which need to be handled manually.
  • Increase flexibility since MTurk lets you gain access to a global, on-demand, 24×7 workforce without the difficulty associated with dynamically scaling.
  • Reduce cost by hiring and managing a temporary workforce. MTurk provides a pay-per-task model.

• Concepts
  • A Requester is a company, organization, or person that creates and submits tasks (HITs) to Amazon Mechanical Turk for Workers to perform.
  • A Human Intelligence Task (HIT) represents a single, self-contained task that a Requester submits to Amazon Mechanical Turk for Workers to perform.
    • Each HIT has a lifetime, specified by the Requester, that determines how long the HIT is available to Workers.
    • A HIT also has an assignment duration, which is the amount of time a Worker has to complete a HIT after accepting it.
  • A Worker is a person who performs the tasks specified by a Requester in a HIT.
    • The Requester specifies how many Workers can work on a task.
    • Amazon Mechanical Turk guarantees that a Worker can work on each task only one time.
  • Developers create the Mechanical Turk applications that Requesters and Workers use.
    • Requesters can create and advertise work using the Mechanical Turk command line interface or the Requester User Interface and thereby not need developers
  • An Assignment specifies how many people can submit completed work for your HIT. When a Worker accepts a HIT, MTurk creates an assignment to track the work to completion. The assignment belongs exclusively to the Worker and guarantees that the Worker can submit results and be eligible for a reward until the time the HIT or assignment expires.
  • A reward is the money a Requester pays to Workers for the satisfactory work they do on HITs.
  • A Qualification is an attribute assigned by you to a Worker. It includes a name and a number value. A HIT can include Qualification requirements that a Worker must meet before they are allowed to accept the HIT.
    • A Qualification type may include a Qualification test. A Qualification test is a set of questions, similar to a HIT, that the Worker must answer to request the Qualification.

Amazon Mechanical Turk Cheat Sheet References:

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/mechanical-turk-use-cases/
https://www.mturk.com/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSMechTurk/latest/AWSMechanicalTurkRequester/Welcome.html