It really helps to have influential friends. Apparently, Steve Fossett’s buddy Richard Branson got in touch with his buddies at Google and asked them if their satellite images could be used to help in the hunt for Steve who has been missing for almost two weeks after his light plane disappeared in Nevada. Subsequently, a set of fresh high-resolution satellite images were taken of the relevant area after he disappeared and uploaded to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service.

Mechanical what? The Mechanical Turk is a website that allows people to collaborate on tasks that only humans are good at (at present). They call it ‘artificial artifical intelligence’. For example, looking for Steve’s plane in thousands of satellite photos. I tried it myself and found that I can check an image in less than 10 seconds. A computer may be able to do it faster, but computerised image analysis is probably not as accurate as human eyes. The Mechanical Turk site facilitates projects like this, where many people can contribute a small part of a larger data-processing project that would be difficult or impossible to program into a computer algorithm.

The Mechanical Turk includes a payment system where you can get paid for each little bit of work that you do. When searching for Steve you don’t get any reward except the warm fuzzy feeling of doing a good deed. But for other projects on the site you can get paid small amounts (usually less than 10 US cents) per small task that you do. Still, at say 5 US cents per task you can make US$10 per hour if you can complete each task in around 18 seconds. For people in developing countries that’s a pretty good wage, and that kind of speed seems feasible for relatively small well-defined tasks.

I have a couple of comments. The first is quality control. Since people get paid by the quantity of work that they do, they have an incentive to do it as quickly as possible. In the search for Steve, they’ve set each image to be examined by multiple people before it’s eliminated from the search set. That’s one way of doing quality control — get multiple people to do the same task and compare the results. However that could be expensive when you have to pay people to work. Alternatively, I’m not sure if Amazon does this already, it might be useful to incorporate some kind of reputation system for workers. If people can establish a reputation for high quality work, and if this could be linked to how much they are paid, then maybe people would have an incentive to work accurately in the first place. It’s a matter of setting the right incentives for speed versus quality.

My second comment is on the design of the site, which I think is bad. As with Amazon’s main website, it’s not very well laid out, and most importantly it’s not optimised for speed. I could review Steve images much faster if the site design were changed a little. For example I had to scroll down to see each image and mark whether it contained anything interesting or not, and then scroll up again to submit the result. The important buttons are just too far apart, and this slows down the work speed. Also the entire page has to reload between images, which is slower than it should be.

Overall, I think the Mechanical Turk is a great idea, provided that the quality control problem can be solved and the site is optimised a bit further. It’ll be interesting to see if this kind of outsourcing (’crowdsourcing’) can be economically viable, or whether the costs and difficulties associated with generating quality work are too great.

If you want to help look for Steve, click here.