Headline, January19, 2014

''' INVENTORS : 

THY GENIUS : O' INVENTORS '''

Mr von Ahn went on to get his doctorate  -  and a phone call from Bill Gates of Microsoft offering him a job, which he turned down.

In Guatemala, nearly all students are tested before entering high school. The top 20 nationwide, of whom Mr von Ahn was one, are sent to a special school.

He went on to study mathematics in America, at Duke University, switching to computer science for his postgraduate studies because it was more practical, ''You talk to a mathematician, and he tells you that he's one in three people in the world who understand the problem and it's not been solved for 200 years,'' says Mr von Ahn.

''A computer scientist says: 'I solved an open problem yesterday'.''

In late 2006 Mr von Ahn had just started teaching Carnegie Mellon, when he received a call from the MacArthur Foundation, saying that he was being awarded one of its coveted  ''genius''  grants of $500,000.

Around the same time, he did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to get a sense of CAPTCHA's popularity, and realised that about 200m squiggly words were being recognised and typed into computers every day by Internet users around the world:

At about ten seconds apiece, that amounted to around half a million hours daily. This improved the security of the Internet, but at the cost of making people perform a task whose results were immediately discarded. Surely the recipient of a genius grant ought to be able to find a way to make more productive use of their efforts?

Driving home from a meeting in Washington, C, he was struck by an idea. Instead of showing the users random letters, why not show them words from scans of old printed texts that automated document-digitisation systems, based on optical character recognition, could not understand?

Such words were, by definition, incomprehensible to computers, but might be legible to humans. They could be shown to people as a part of a modified CAPTCHA test, based on two words, and is granted access provided the control word is correctly identified. And when a few users separately provide the same interpretation of the scanned word, it is fed back to the digitisation system.

People performing online security checks could thus be put to work digitising old books and newspapers, without even realising that they were doing so. Mr von Ahn called his new idea reCAPTCHA, and when New York Times began to use the technology to digitise its archive, he span it out into a separate company.

In 2009 it too was acquired by Google, for use in its ambitious book-digitisation project. The slogan for reCAPTCHA is :

''Stop spam, read books''.

 Dr von Ahn went to work at the Internet giant for a year. Paradoxically one of his tasks while at Google was to shut down the ESP Game. It had served its purpose:

Labelling enough images to train an image recognition system based on artificial intelligence, which could then perform the task automatically.

This honour post continues:

With respectful dedication to all the Students, Professors and Teachers of Guatemala. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' !WOW! Is Your Future '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless