On March 12, in the Volkhovskiy Building, a workshop on crowdsourcing from specialists from the Yandex.Toloka team was held. Daria Baydakova, Head of New Projects in Crowdsourcing Management, Dmitry Ustalov, Researcher of Automatic Language Processing, and Olga Matveenko, Educational Project Manager, told how to correctly collect and mark up data on the Yandex.Toloka platform. 

Crowdsourcing is a methodology for collecting and marking up data by attracting a large number of users. The technology can be used by large companies, for example, in order to understand the demand and needs of customers or users and satisfy them. Yandex. Toloka is a crowdsourcing platform from Yandex, which allows users to earn money, and developers to collect and improve data quality quickly and cheaply. Users receive rewards for performing various tasks: from searching for company data and assessing the quality of content, to analyzing web resources. On the part of companies and developers, the service can be used in machine learning, in business — users can be given routine tasks, and thus, they will save time and money for the business, and for data analysis, because service capabilities provide conditions for quick testing of hypotheses and quality experiments.  

According to Daria Baydakova, Project Manager, the amount of data will grow all the time, and along with it the need to competently and quickly collect and analyze this data will grow too. It is among the tasks of company leaders, product managers and marketers. Such services as Yandex.Toloka  reduce the time working with data, and therefore interest in them will only increase. 

GSOM and the Faculty of Applied Mathematics students took part in the seminar. They tried to implement the interesting task of image analysis on the service, and now they can use the platform to collect data for a diploma, research or improve the quality of the data they have to work with.