CAPTCHA is an internet safeguard against automated
form-filling programs. Created by Luis Von Ahn, an associate professor at
Carnegie Mellon University, CAPTCHAs consist of randomly generated character
images that only a human user can decipher in order to submit online forms.
With 200 million CAPTCHAs used every day, Professor Ahn realized that he could
use this large amount of “human labor” to solve large-scale problems. As a
result, ReCAPTCHA was invented to help digitize books by having one of the
random character images be a scanned word from an actual book. This showed Ahn that
the internet is a very powerful tool to coordinate people’s minimal
contributions for surprisingly useful goals. This led him to the idea of using
millions of people to translate the web for free. Instead of paying for
language software, people can learn foreign languages and practice translating
real web content on his free website, Duolingo.com. Combining multiple
unprofessional user translations actually results in an accurate translation of
websites, which can speed up the process of translating and spreading information
worldwide. This is a win-win strategy and this network of internet users is key
towards the project’s success.
This
innovative project is a great example of network economics, a topic that is
going to be covered in class. Wikipedia defines network economics as, “
business economics that benefit from network effects”. In other words, it’s a
business model where the number of users affects how much value a product has
for others. Duolingo.com uses this network effect and appeals to two types of
users. One type of user is language learners who want to learn a foreign
language for free. The other types of user are the worldwide readers and
businesses that would like to have website content translated into multiple
languages. As more Duolingo users participate, more of the internet can be
translated accurately, economically, and efficiently. This helps build and strengthen the program to help achieve
its overall goal of increased international accessibility and connectivity over
the web. This is a very interesting and useful business model, and the internet
serves as a vital platform for this model. The internet provides a fast way to
access a variety of information, and is a powerful tool for combining user-input
with computer learning. This project is a great example of how the internet can
help us create useful economic cycles and generate benefits for society.
Crowd-sourcing = Awesome. I find it disappointing that we haven't brought crowd-sourcing to the highest intellectual levels. For example, for programming problems, there is StackOverflow; for physics questions, there is physicsforums; why is there no forum for P=NP? (Or maybe there is, but from my understanding, scientific collaborations number in the less than 10s whereas the number of people working on similar problems that could benefit from the insight of others numbers in the 10,000s or more).
ReplyDeleteTo speculate, I think Quora's method of introducing you content that people you 'follow' have read or liked could lead (with some additional network exploitation) to global collaborative efforts. How many degrees away can all particle physicists possibly be?
Actually, there are examples of "crowd sourcing for science" starting to pop up. Within CS theory, there's the "TCS stack-exchange" for talking about issues in proofs, etc: http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/
DeleteAnd, within math there have recently been some "polymath" projects organized by Field's medalist Terence Tao that attempt to bring 100s+ mathematicians together to solve one important problem http://polymathprojects.org/