Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration | Talk Video | TED.com:
Do you Duolingo? Maybe you should!
"After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books, Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the Internet for greater good."
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This TED talk is really interesting. It deals with Captcha, the deformed word you have to type at the end of an evaluation form on the Internet. The speaker is the man that invented this concept. It is a way to distinguish human from machines on websites. A machine can't indeed read nor guess these deformed words. It prevents a machine from doing actions such as adding a friend on Facebook, etc...
ReplyDeleteBut the thing really amazing is that this guy transform this annoying action (typing captcha is annoying) into a way to digitise books. He solves two problemes at the same time: on one hand, computer can't read and digitise some words of a book. It is quite embarassing because we want to save human knowledge, and digitising them is a way to do so. On the other hand, we don't want machines to do some actions on the web, and we would like to check if it is a real user or a machine. Using captcha, we can both check that the user is a human-being, and digitise one more word thanks to the user, typing the word.
That is why I am enthousiastic about this video ! You should watch it. You will understand that you were a contributor to this project without even knowing it.
This guy is fantastic. At the beginning, i believe he doesn't look like funny but more as a strange genius, but I have laughed during the 16 minutes. On top of that, he has really good idea. He is using captcha to digitize books. And his second idea is even more exciting. How to learn a foreign language for free and to translate the web. You want the answer... look the video and spend a really good time !
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