AutoMan: Human-Computation Runtime v0.2.1
---------------------------------------

This is a preliminary release of AutoMan.  Please report any bugs you
may find to the project maintainer, Dan Barowy <[email protected]>.

Presently, we have only tested AutoMan with Scala programs.  In
principle, Java can use AutoMan as-is, but adding official support is
currently on our TODO list.

License
-------

AutoMan is licensed under the GPLv2, Copyright (C) 2011-2012 The
University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Compiling AutoMan
-----------------

To use AutoMan, you will need to compile a JAR.  Currently, this is
a manual process, and you will need to fetch all of the required
libraries manually.  We are putting together an Apache Buildr script
that will do this for you, and we will add this file to the repository
shortly.

Using AutoMan in Your Project
-----------------------------

In your source file, import the Mechanical Turk adapter (Scala syntax):

  import edu.umass.cs.automan.adapters.MTurk.MTurkAdapter

After that, initialize the AutoMan runtime with an MTurk config and
define your tasks.  You may then call those tasks like regular
functions.  Note that these functions return immediately, as calling
a human function runs in a separate background thread.

In order to access data returned by the function, you must call
apply on the object returned by the function and then access the
"value" field in the Answer object, as human functions return
Future[Answer] objects.  E.g.,

  val answer = human_function(args)
  answer().value

Automan v0.3 is likely to simplify this syntax somewhat.  Automan v0.1
did not use Scala's built-in futures.

Please see the collection of sample programs in the "sample_programs"
directory. This folder contains the programs we used in the technical
report (see below).


Using AutoMan with a Different Crowdsourcing Backend
----------------------------------------------------

We currently only support Amazon's Mechanical Turk.  However, AutoMan
was designed to accommodate arbitrary backends.  If you are interested
in seeing your backend supported, please contact Dan Barowy.

However, we are happy to work with you to ensure that you have all of
the information you need to write your adapter library. We will also fix
any compatibility problems with the AutoMan runtime that you might
encounter along the way.

Memoization
-----------

AutoMan saves all intermediate human-computed results.  In the event
of a program exception or unexpected termination, the programmer may
restart AutoMan and it will reuse any previously-obtained results.  If
you want to discard these intermediate results, delete the
AutomanMemoDB file.  The format of this database is Apache Derby 10.8.

More Information
----------------

More detailed information is available in our technical report:

  UMass CS TR 2012-013:
  AutoMan: A Platform for Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation
  Daniel W. Barowy, Charlie Curtsinger, Emery D. Berger, and Andrew McGregor

  http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/AutoMan-UMass-CS-TR-2012-013.pdf

This paper has been accepted at OOPSLA 2012.  We will have an updated citation and a link for the final version of the paper in the near future.

Contact information:

  Emery Berger, [email protected]
  Dan Barowy, [email protected]

CHANGELOG:
----------
0.2.1:	Maintenance release.
		• Update to work with latest MTurk API (1.6.0).  
		• Better log output, including scheduler object logging.
		• New Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) app.
0.2:	Major rewrite to simplify syntax.
0.1:	First release.