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 mobile crowdsourcing platform


MobileWorks: A Mobile Crowdsourcing Platform for Workers at the Bottom of the Pyramid

AAAI Conferences

Existing crowdsourcing markets are often inaccessible to workers living at the bottom of the economic pyramid. We present MobileWorks, a mobile phone-based crowdsourcing platform intended to provide employment to developing world users. MobileWorks provides human optical character recognition (OCR) tasks that can be completed by workers on low-end mobile phones through a web browser. To address the limited screen resolution available on low-end phones, MobileWorks divides documents into many small pieces and sends each piece to a different worker. An initial pilot study with 10 users over a two month period revealed that it is feasible to do basic OCR tasks using a simple mobile web-based application. We find that workers using MobileWorks average 120 tasks per hour at an accuracy rate of 99% using a multiple entry solution. In addition, users had a positive experience with MobileWorks: all study participants would recommend MobileWorks to friends and family.