# Professor John Horton shares insights from oDesk's improvements to its software and efficiency

1 Faculty News December 20, 2016 ![MIT Sloan Management Review logo](/sites/default/files/styles/246w/public/assets/images/con_032335.jpg?itok=dbINhamc)>

Excerpt from [MIT Sloan Management Review](http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-smart-way-to-deal-with-messy-data/) -- "'Once everyone was speaking the same language vis-à-vis skills,' says [Horton](http://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/john-horton), 'we could build a bunch of new features without having to do lots of machine learning to figure out what people were talking about. This kicked off a more general attempt in the company, named "Project Babel" to find important unstructured data and then structure it.'"

[Read more](http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-smart-way-to-deal-with-messy-data/)