Daniel Khashabi, assistant professor of computer science and member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing, has been named a recipient of an Amazon Research Award in the Amazon Web Services AI category for his proposal, “Crowdsourcing with Machine Backbone.”
Amazon Research Awards provide unrestricted funds to academic researchers investigating various research topics in multiple disciplines. Awardees additionally have access to more than 300 Amazon public datasets and AWS AI/ML services and tools. AWS AI specifically aims to advance machine learning research by funding the development of open-source tools and research that benefit the ML community at large.
This award will support Khashabi’s research on streamlining the annotation and collection of crowdsourced data via Amazon Mechanical Turk through the use of ML models trained to parse visually grounded contexts, such as HTML-rich websites. Trained models will ideally be able to verify, support, and sort human responses and tasks to reduce the current burden on MTurk workers, allowing them to spend more time on nuanced tasks that truly require detailed human input.