Headline, January18, 2014

''' TO GUATEMALA WITH GARLANDS :

 DR LUIS VON AHN '''

Mr Von Ahn grew up in Guatemala, the son of two doctors. He stumbled into computers indirectly. In the mid-1980s at the age of eight, he wanted to play a video games. But instead of giving him a Nintendo console his mother bought him a PC.

To play games on it, he resorted to typing in programs from computer magazines and working out how to crack the copy-protection schemes on games sold on floppy discs.

The young Luis also spent some time at a confectionery factory owned by his family. He was fascinated by the machines that made and wrapped sweets, and was soon taking some of them apart and reassembling them.

His love of engineering endured, but not his sweet tooth. ''I got to play around the whole time  -but now I can't stand the taste of mint,'' he says.

Only a few weeks into graduate school and aged just 22, Luis von Ahn helped crack one of the thorniest problems bedevilling the web.

It was the year 2000 and free, web-based email services were booming. But spammers were creating thousands of accounts automatically and using them to blast out messages.

When the accounts were shutdown, they simply created new ones. At the same time, sites selling tickets to concerts and sporting  events were being besieged by programs that bombarded them with orders, snapping up the best seats for resale at a higher price.

Websites needed a way to distinguish between human visitors and automated ones.

Mr von Ahn had just arrived at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh when he and his PhD adviser, Manuel Blum, came up with just such a method. The solution had three requirements:

It had to be a test that humans could pass easily and computers could not   -but could use computers to determine whether the response was correct. The original idea was to show web users an image, for example of a cat or a roller coaster, and ask them to identify it.

A correct answer would indicate that the entity at the other end of the Internet connection was indeed human, granting access to the web-mail service or ticketing site.

But it turned out that people were not very good at identifying images reliably.

So the pair came up with another idea: displaying a distorted sequence of letters and asking people to read them and type them into a box. This proved to be a much more reliable test of whether a visitor to a website was human or not:

Something that is known, in computer science terminology, as a Turing test, in honour of Alan Turing, a British Computer Scientist. 

The result was the CAPTCHA, which stands for ''Completely Automated Public Turing test To tell Computers and Humans Apart''. 

Yahoo and other web-mail providers implemented the system, and it immediately made life very very hard for spammers.

He has since created a series of Internet based systems that bring many people together to perform useful work by diving the tasks into tiny pieces, often presented as a simple test or a game, and aggregating the results.

A decade ago, Mr von Ahn called his approach  ''human computation'' -the title of his thesis-  and   ''games with a purpose''   -precursors to the modern techniques of  -''crowdsourcing''  and  ''gamification''.

For example he noticed that search engines were bad bad at finding images, because pictures on web pages are rarely labelled with need captions. 

So he created the ESP Game, in which two players in different locations are simultaneously shown the same page in their web browsers, and asked to type words describing whats in it.

Each round of the game ends when both players use the same word, so the aim is to use the most obvious descriptive terms. In so doing, the players tag each image, and signal which word best describes it.

The technology was acquired by Google in 2005 to help label images for its search engine.

The Technology Post continues:

With respectful dedication to Mr Stephen Schwarzman, Chairman Blackstone Group, a private equity firm, for his splendid gesture of a $300 million scholarship programme in China.

Under this programme over 200 students from around the world will attend classes at Beijing's Tsinghua University. This university is the alma mater of Xi Jinping, the President of China.

   

Lets have the Young China hands on !WOW! -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' Let's Go '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless