vskr

I am looking for services ML researchers (or hobbyists) use to get training data for their models.

If you use one of the popular services like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, or Crowdflower, what kind of tasks do you submit to those services.

Are tasks typically a classification tasks, where user is presented with a set of classes and is required to select one (or more) classes that identify the task at hand.

I am collecting some data, as part of a project. Please be kind, and let me know if you any of what I asked doesn't make any sense.

I am working on service which exposes REST API.

What is the best way to implement authorization for incoming requests.

* Identify who is making the request. Can we use api key for this.

* Make sure this REST api can be used just as easily using curl. I am not sure how to do this, as I dn't think exposing API key is a good idea. I can ask clients to hash request params with api key, but that makes it non-trivial to use with curl.

What are the standard practices, and what are the trade offs.

Please be kind and helpful. If I said anything wrong, please correct me instead of flagging this.

Any help would be appreciated. Glad to provide any info that makes it useful to answer

I am curious how small companies (or resarchers/individuals/hobbyists) get their training data.

Do you Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Do you use any other service.

What do you find lacking in those services.

Because your manager is a great manager

I want to develop a mobile app for prediction markets, which allows users to predict outcome of events, e.g. Will Life of Pi win "Best movie" Academy award.

Before developing I want to know if there is enough demand for such an application. Would you use such an app if it is available in the market right now.

There is a popular prediction market sit e called InTrade, which is recently banned in US because it allows users to predict using real money