Looking at a photo and deciding whether the person depicted is happy, angry or sad may seem like a trivial task for anyone to do. However, differing contexts and other subtle factors make it very costly for a computer to do the same.
Being able to analyze subjective information automatically is an invaluable tool for small businesses. This data can be used to shape business decisions and drive profits.
One way to achieve this goal is through crowdsourcing. In other words, getting a large group of volunteers to participate in a common problem and combining their contirbutions. Actually organizing, funding, and managing a project like this can be daunting and expensive, this is where Amazon's Mechanical Turk comes in.
This talk will explain how Mechanical Turk works and cover various ways in which it can be leveraged by anyone. We will cover use cases that have been successful, the mechanics of posting, processing and testing tasks, and specific tools for accomplishing these goals.
Happy Hour
Afterwards, keep the conversation going by joining us for a happy hour at Nodding Head Brewery (1516 Sansom St.) from 5:00 - 7:00 p.m. All are welcome, but the first 40 who register for our session will receive a drink ticket on us! (Drink ticket may only be obtained by attending the session.)
Speakers: Michael Becker & Kelly O'Brien
Michael Becker is Senior Data Engineer at the email marketing software company AWeber, and founder of the DataPhilly Meetup group. On a day to day basis, he spends a majority of his time acquiring, scrubbing, exploring, and visualizing data. He loves machine learning and gets his kicks off of clustering, regression and classification algorithms.
Kelly O'Brien is a Software Engineer at the email marketing software company AWeber, where she works behind the scenes as a pythonista doing data analysis, spam detection and machine learning. With a Master's in Computer and InformationTechnology from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering, Kelly has most recently been working as a crowd sorcerer and ambassador to the Mechanical Turk machines. She also enjoys skiing, reading, drinking wine and listening to country music.