Summary
Crowd Sourcing provides a quick and easily scalable way to request help from people, but how do you ensure they are properly paying attention instead of cheating in some way? Since tasks are handed off through some platform that handles the abstraction of assigning work to the workers, the requesters cannot guarantee the participants full attention. This is where this team has created CrowdScape, to keep better track of the attention and focus of the participants. Utilizing various Javascript libraries, CrowdScape is able to keep track of the participants through their interaction or lack of interactions. This program is able to track participants’ mouse clicks, key strokes, and browser focus changes. Since Amazon Turk is a web-based platform, Javascript libraries are perfectly able to track this information. Through the various visualization libraries retrieved, the team is able to demonstrate the visualization that provides extra insight information to the requestors. Through these advanced visualizations it’s demonstrated how the team is able to determine the workers behavior, including if they only have rapid clicks and shift windows fast or stay on the same window and stay focused on the window.
Reflection
I do appreciate the kind of insight this provides through delegating work. I have worked with mentoring various workers in some of my past internships, and it has provided various stress. With some of the more professional workers they are easier to manage, however with others it usually takes more time to manage them and teach them then doing the work themselves. Being able to automatically do this and discard the work of participants provides a lot of freedom to discard lacking participants since creators can not necessarily oversee the participants working.
I do however strongly disagree with how much information is being tracked and requested. A strong proponent of privacy, browser technology is not the best of domains to track and inject programs to watch the session and information of the participant. Though this is limited to the browser, any other session information, such as cookies, ids, or uids, could potentially be accessed. Though not necessarily able to be tracked from the app, other live Javascript could track the information via the CrowdScape program.
Questions
- One of my first initial concerns with this type of project is the amount of privacy invasion. Though it makes sense to ensure the worker is working, there could always be the potential of leaked issues of confidential information. Though they could limit the key tracking to the time when the participant is focused on the browser window, do you think this would be a major concern for participants?
- Throughout the cases studied through the team’s experiments, it seemed most of the participants were able to be discarded since they were using some other tool or external help. Do you think as many people would be discarded within real experiments for similar reasons?
- Alongside the previous question, is it over reaching in a sense as to potential discredit workers if they have different working habits then expected?
