Get Better Results with Amazon Mechanical Turk Masters

There are now more than 500,000 Mechanical Turk Workers in 190 countries on the Mechanical Turk marketplace. These Workers are ready and eager to work on a wide variety of tasks (Human Intelligence Tasks or HITS) including data cleansing, image filtering, image tagging, and categorization.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Mechanical Turk Masters. This new feature gives Requesters direct access to the best Workers on the Mechanical Turk marketplace. Masters are an elite group of Workers, who have demonstrated superior performance while completing thousands of HITs across the Marketplace. Masters must maintain this high level of performance or they may lose this distinction. Mechanical Turk has built technology which analyzes Worker performance, identifies high performing Workers and monitors their performance over time. Starting today, Requesters will be able to access two types of Masters — Photo Moderation Masters and Categorization Masters. Workers with these qualifications will have a certain skill set. For example:

• Photo Moderation Masters have proven that they can review photos against site guidelines, determine if a photo includes specific content, or pick the best photo given a set of criteria.
• Categorization Masters have proven that they can categorize web pages, advertisements, or products in a social catalog. They can also classify the sentiment of social media content.

These qualifications are automatically granted to Mechanical Turk Workers on an on-going basis. Mechanical Turk Masters have exclusive access to HITS that require a Masters qualification. They also have access to a private forum, and need not navigate through a CAPTCHA to work on HITS.

With this new system, skills developed on HITS from one Requester can now qualify Workers to handle HITS from other Requesters.

Read more about this new feature on the Mechanical Turk blog.

— Jinesh