Massive-scale online collaboration | Luis von Ahn

TED · 315.4K views · 2011-12-06 · 16:40

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Overview

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, explains how small contributions from many people online can digitize books. He then introduces Duolingo as a way to translate the web while people learn languages.

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HN commenters recommend it as the clearest account of human computation and games with a purpose, straight from the inventor.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2012–2022

Topics

Futurism & technology and society Computer vision, speech & NLP Ideas & learning (other)

What people said

vowelless · 2014-04 · Strong recommendation
I highly recommend watching the TED talk by Luis von Ahn, creater of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA. He calls this "human computation". He is also the founder of Duolingo. [VIDEO]
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drucken · 2012-01 · Strong recommendation
The interesting thing about these human-based attempts to defeat individual CAPTCHA-"protected" services is that if they are actually reCAPTCHA or variants, they perform a strong socially useful function! This is because reCAPTCHA solving is linked to the digitization of paper documents. There was recently a TEDTalk by the inventor of the CAPTCHA about this topic. It is very informative and entertaining. I highly recommend it: [VIDEO]
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elviejo · 2022-03 · Recommendation
Yes this is called Games with a Purpose. It is Luis Von Ahn thesis. Luis created: recaptcha, to help digitilize books by harnessing millions of captchas. The ESP game to help tag images for search purposes. Both sold to Google And later founded Duolingo, to democratize language learning. His Ted talk is a good starting point. [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by TED, played through YouTube.

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