Headline, January20, 2014

''' THE EXQUISITE MULTIPLES AND 

MURALS OF THE INTERNET '''

''Education seems like it should be an equaliser, but really it is not,'' says Dr von Ahn.

''If you have money, you can get a good education; if not, you don't.''

He has seen at first hand what access to high quality education can do, and wants to use technology to make it more widely available. This is, he realises, a far more ambitious aim than blocking spam or scanning books, useful as those are.

But returning to the tale : other similar projects followed. Verbosity, for example, got players to create compendium of common sense facts, such as ''milk is white'', which people know but computers do not.

But none of Dr von Ahn's other projects have come close to reCATTCHA when it comes to doing useful work. The system now handles 100m words a day, equivalent to 200m books a year.

If Google were to pay people  America's minimum wage to read and type in those illegible words, it would cost it around $500m a year.

Although still in his early 30s, Dr von Ahn has already made a unique contribution to computer science and artificial intelligence, by harnessing what he calls  ''the combined power of humans and computers to solve problems that would be impossible for either to solve alone.''

Put simply, the idea is to  ''take something that already happens and try to get something out of it,'' he says. His work exploits the internet's ability to reduce coordination and transaction costs, so that the efforts of hundreds of million of people can be aggregated effectively.

Mr von Ahn estimates that more than a billion people have helped digitise the printed word by using reCAPTCHA

The notion of  ''human computation''  has spawned its own academic field. But did Mr von Ahn really set out to generate useful results from mundane tasks, or did he stumble on the concept with CAPTCHA and then apply it in other domains?

''It is a combination of both,'' he says. He recently came across a plan, devised when he was  13   and saved by his mother, for a power company that would operate a free gym and generate electricity from people lifting weights, cycling and so forth.

This was, he now realises the precursor of his computer science work, which does the same for mental activity.

Dr von Ahn has won many prizes, including a presidential award for excellence in science. He has a gaggle of patents to his name. His old blue Volkswagen has been replaced by a blue Porsche. And he continues to apply his distinctive approach to new problems.  

He latest project is a company which he co-founded last year, called Duolingo. It helps people learn a foreign language -the game-  while also providing a translation service -the useful work. 

People are shown a word or phrase which they do their best to translate; others than vote on the best translation. Duolingo already has 3m users, who use it, on average for 30 minutes a day. 

To sum, there is a clear thread running through his work, even as he tries to apply his approach to tackling bigger societal problems, not just technical ones.

''Whether people are in the gym, logging on to e-mail or learning a new language, he wants to enable them to  ''do something useful  -and harness the power that they generate.''

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

Special dedication to Pakistan's great and  formidable son. This great Warrior : Imran Khan.

Tell me, where is the KPK IDE?!! How come:

Compress time. Put this fine lad Ahmed Akbar Khan to lead/  Push SAP for free training on ERP . Send a team to China and Russia for and get IT work.

Put KPK to work.

Rabo, Dee,  go....... coordinate. 

''' Knowledge For Action '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless