Blog: Profile: Luis von Ahn; human-assisted computation

Profile: Luis von Ahn
BusinessWeek (11/03/08) Scanlon, Jessie

Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Luis von Ahn has developed digitization software that could put the New York Times' entire archive, which dates back to 1851, online by late 2009. The newspaper has been using typists to digitize its archive, and in 10 years they have been able to digitize 27 years of articles. Von Ahn's software will process 129 years in less than 24 months. Von Ahn's research focuses on what he calls "human computation." He develops Web-based programs that take advantage of human abilities, such as reading or knowing common-sense facts, and then aggregating that knowledge to solve large-scale, ongoing problems in computer science. Von Ahn's first breakthrough technology, the Captcha, developed with von Ahn's thesis advisor Manuel Blum in 2000, is used by 60,000 Web sites to verify that the entity filling out a Web registration form is in fact a human. However, von Ahn released ReCaptcha, an updated version of the technology that replaced Captcha's random letters with words from library archives, and now the New York Times' archive, that computers were not able to read, helping complete digitization projects. Another example of human computation is von Ahn's ESP Game, in which two players are shown the same image and asked to type in descriptive labels. When the labels match, the players are awarded points and shown another image. The game helps generate tags for online images.

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