MobileWorks: a mobile crowdsourcing platform for workers at the bottom of the pyramid

Abstract

Abstract- We present MobileWorks, a mobile phone-based crowdsourcing platform. MobileWorks targets workers in developing countries who live at the bottom of the eco-nomic pyramid. This population does not have access to desktop computers, so existing microtask labor markets are inaccessible to them. MobileWorks offers human OCR tasks that can be accomplished on low-end mobile phones; workers access it through their mobile web browser. To ad-dress the limited screen resolution available on low-end phones, MobileWorks segments documents into many small pieces, and sends each piece to a different worker. A first pilot study with 10 users over a period of 2 months re-vealed that it is feasible to do simple OCR tasks using sim-ple Mobile Web based application. We found that on an average the workers do the tasks at 120 tasks per hour. Us-ing single entry the accuracy of workers across the differ-ent documents is 89 %. We propose a multiple entry solu-tion which increases the theoretical accuracy of the OCR to more than 99%. I.