MCL350: Humans vs. the Machines: How Pinterest Uses Amazon Mechanical Turk’s Worker Community to Improve Machine Learning

Ever since the term “crowdsourcing” was coined in 2006, it's been a buzzword for technology companies and social institutions. In the technology sector, crowdsourcing is instrumental for verifying machine learning algorithms, which, in turn, improves the user's experience. In this session, we explore how Pinterest adapted to an increased reliability on human evaluation to improve their product, with a focus on how they've integrated with Mechanical Turk's platform. This presentation is aimed at engineers, analysts, program managers, and product managers who are interested in how companies rely on Mechanical Turk's human evaluation platform to better understand content and improve machine learning algorithms. The discussion focuses on the analysis and product decisions related to building a high quality crowdsourcing system that takes advantage of Mechanical Turk's powerful worker community.