Amazon Mechanical Turk The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the suites of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables computer programmers (known as Requesters) who are located in America to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. The Requesters are able to pose tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a store-front, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk’s Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the more limited Mturk Requester site.
Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker’s reputation. Currently, a Requester has to have a U.S. address, but Workers can be anywhere in the world. Payments for completing tasks can be redeemed on Amazon.com via gift certificate or be later transferred to a Worker’s U.S. bank account or transferred to the worker’s Paypal account. Requesters, which are typically corporations, pay 10 percent over the price of successfully completed HITs (or more for extremely cheap HITs) to Amazon.
