Arpi Mardirossian

The British Journal of Photography has published the Tagasauris story on its site. Check it out here!

The British Journal of Photography has picked up the Tagasauris story from Magnum Photos, out in print this week. Read it here!

I am very proud to announce the launch of Tagasauris. We have been working hard to develop innovative solutions for unlocking the value of multimedia collections by improving find-ability through quick, cost-effective and accurate descriptive labels. Tagasauris is a media tagging tool that’s powered by the crowd. We provide superior quality tags at lightening speed for a fraction of the cost of more traditional methods. We also connect these tags to well defined concepts and metadata with unique URLs. This means that everybody uses the same names for tags from the world’s largest collection of knowledge.

I recently attended CrowdConf 2010, a conference on crowdsourcing, in San Francisco, CA. It was a very well organized and informative event. Some of the highlights of the day for me were (in order of appearance):

Leila Chirayath Janah (Samasource): connecting people living in poverty with microwork

Martijn Lampert (Motivaction): managing a crowd of Dutch consumers for panel research

John Horton (Harvard): Algorithmic Wage Negotiations: Applications to Paid Crowdsourcing

Dana Chandler (MIT) and Adam Kapelner (U Penn): Preventing Satisficing in Online Surveys: A ‘Kapcha’ to Ensure Higher Quality Data

David Alan Grier: When Computers Were Human

Patrick Meier (Ushahidi): Crowdsourcing Crisis Information: The Future of Humanitarian Response

I have been working with Tocarte on the development of a high performance annotation solution that makes images more discoverable and connected. The system also helps optimize both productivity and accuracy of crowd-sourced workers. It goes beyond simple free-text tags and associates strong IDs to unique, well-defined concepts and metadata.