conferences that it’s become important
for them to establish good reputations
with workers. If they put out tasks that
aren’t clear or if they upset workers by
not paying them, they sometimes need
to create a new account and start from
scratch. They find that treating workers
badly can certainly raise the cost of do-
ing business.”
Luis von Ahn, a professor of com-
puter science at Carnegie Mellon Uni-
versity and a crowdsourcing expert,
says Irani is one of the few people try-
ing to stop abuse on the part of the
employers. Much more frequently, the
abuse that takes place is on the part of
the workers who try to game the sys-
tem, hoping to get paid for little or no
effort, he observes.

“Imagine a crowdsource task that
pays people to look at images and tag
each one with a description,” he ex-
plains. “A worker can just, say, hit the
‘F’ key a few times and hope to get paid
for that useless input.”
Employers use various techniques
to limit such shenanigans—either by
refusing to pay for a response unless at
least one other worker agrees with that
response, or by testing each worker to
make sure they are capable of doing
the task.

Von Ahn estimates that, on Mechanical Turk, 10%–20% of the workers try to cheat in some form or another. Far fewer employers cheat, he maintains.

“We’re talking about workers who
may be in some other country, often In-
dia, who can easily remain anonymous,
and so it’s easy for them to cheat,” von
Ahn explains. “On the other hand, the
employer is usually a university or a
large company like Google and is much
less prone to cheating because they
have a lot more to lose.”
Von Ahn does agree with Irani on
one count: “She built Turkopticon to
protect the little guy, and that’s a good
thing, I think,” he says. “When the little
guy, the worker, gets cheated out of the
buck or two per hour that he makes—
and that is what most of these crowd-
source workers do make—that’s a lot
nastier than if the employer loses the
money. Because a few bucks mean a lot
more to the guy who lives in India than
to the employer.”
Anand Kulkarni agrees. He is the
CEO of MobileWorks, a competitor to
MTurk that bills itself as an online la-
bor platform designed to put the work-
ers’ interests first.

ACM Member News

nancy amato is
PassionatE aBout
REsEaRch, mEntoRinG Texas A&M University computer science and engineering professor Nancy Amato is passionate about two things: her esearch on motion planning, robotics, and computational
biology, and her mentoring of a
diverse group of students.
the Pacific northwest native,
who refers to herself as an
“accidental computer scientist”
because it took her so long
to decide on a career course,
received undergraduate degrees
in Mathematical sciences and
economics from stanford
university, and M.s. and Ph. D.
degrees in computer science
from the university of California
at Berkeley and the university of
illinois at urbana-Champaign.

striving for practical application of her research, amato works on motion-planning problems in abstract settings and applies them to real-world situations like robotic surgeries and architectural applications. she currently is using motion-planning algorithms to devise better methods of evacuation planning. “our goal is to modify architectural designs to enable first responders to speed emergency evacuations,” amato explains.

amato serves as co-director for the Distributed research experience for undergraduates mentoring program, a joint program of the Computer

research association’s
Committee on the status of
Women in Computing research
and the Coalition to Diversify
Computing. in 2012, amato
accepted texas high school senior
kensen shi into the program. shi,
working with amato’s graduate
students, wrote a paper on a
more-efficient motion-planning
algorithm; he subsequently
entered the 2012 siemens
Competition in Math, science
and technology and won first
prize, which includes a $100,000
scholarship. “kensen is brilliant
and i felt very proud to have
mentored him; in a few years i’ll
be saying, ‘i knew him when.’”
—Laura DiDio