Crowdsourcing Used to Augment Machine Learning

As unstructured data continues to pile up, different approaches and platforms are emerging to help businesses make greater analytical use of what otherwise might amount to clutter. Among the latest approaches is an "intelligent crowdsourcing platform" from Spare5, a Seattle-based startup specializing in, among other things, data "cleanup." Spare5's proprietary platform unveiled Wednesday (April 13) incorporates a crowdsourcing approach that leverages the experience of domain specialists to perform "custom micro-tasks." Once "filtered for quality," the resulting tasks can be used for applications ranging from training artificial intelligence models and improving searches to augmenting directories. The crowdsourcing platform combines human insights with machine learning techniques to untangle and promote wider analytics use of unstructured data.