Next week I’ll be hosting a webcast featuring Adam Marcus, one of the foremost experts on the topic of “humans-in-the-loop” machine learning systems. It’s a subject many data scientists have heard about, but very few have had the experience of building productions systems that leverage humans:
Crowdsourcing marketplaces like Elance-oDesk or CrowdFlower give us access to people all over the world that can solve various tasks, such as virtual personal assistants, image labelers, or people that can clean up gnarly datasets. Humans can solve tasks that artificial intelligence is not yet able to solve, or needs help in solving, without having to resort to complex machine learning or statistics. But humans are quirky: give them bad instructions, allow them to get bored, or make them do too repetitive a task, and they will start making mistakes. In this webcast, I’ll explain how to effectively benefit from crowd workers to solve your most challenging tasks, using examples from the wild and from our work at GoDaddy.
Machine learning and crowdsourcing are at the core of most of the problems we solve on the Locu team at GoDaddy. When possible, we automate tasks with the help of trained regressions and classifiers. However, it’s not always possible to build machine-only decision-making tools, and we often need to marry machines and crowds. During the webcast, I will highlight how we build human-machine hybrids and benefit from active learning workflows. I’ll also discuss learnings from 17 conversations with companies that make heavy use of crowd work that Aditya Parameswaran and I have collected for our upcoming book.
A recent article in the NYTimes Magazine mentioned a machine-learning system built by some neuroscience researchers that is an excellent example of having “humans-in-the-loop”:
In 2012, Seung started EyeWire, an online game that challenges the public to trace neuronal wiring — now using computers, not pens — in the retina of a mouse’s eye. Seung’s artificial-intelligence algorithms process the raw images, then players earn points as they mark, paint-by-numbers style, the branches of a neuron through a three-dimensional cube. The game has attracted 165,000 players in 164 countries. In effect, Seung is employing artificial intelligence as a force multiplier for a global, all-volunteer army that has included Lorinda, a Missouri grandmother who also paints watercolors, and Iliyan (a.k.a. @crazyman4865), a high-school student in Bulgaria who once played for nearly 24 hours straight. Computers do what they can and then leave the rest to what remains the most potent pattern-recognition technology ever discovered: the human brain.
For more on this important topic, join me and Adam on January 22nd!