TEDxCMU -- Luis von Ahn -- Duolingo: The Next Chapter in Human Computation

Luis von Ahn, the man who brought the world CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA unveiled his newest and most innovative project to date: Duolingo. How can you translate the entire internet and do it for free? Duolingo will be a revolutionary product in which millions of internet users from around the world will work together to translate the internet and learn a new language at the same time. All for free.

Luis von Ahn is the A. Nico Habermann Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He builds systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone.

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Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• TEDx
• TEDxCMU
• Duolingo
• Luis von Ahn
• Carnegie Mellon
• CMU
• Human Computation
• CAPTCHA
• reCAPTCHA
• English

[marioaae]

Luis von Ahn is from Guatemala

[golddustwoman27]

Give this man a nobel prize....knowledge is a gift!

[29boby]

DuoLingo in action - watch?v=VP71aB08G_M

[29boby]

If you want to see DuoLingo in action - watch?v=VP71aB08G_M

[christletine]

@fallofshadows It's very obvious which one is the word from the NYTimes archive and which is the captcha. (You do not have to type the NYTimes word to have your input accepted!) The captcha is wobbly and the other word is usually totally readable, or it's a number or an equation (probably explaining why the OCR is having trouble with it). Why is the entire world doing work for the New York Times? Maybe we would rather choose a different newspaper archive to transcribe.

[luiguimas]

Interesting and nice design, but I prefer "Studystream" by FAR!

WOW! That's impressive, fun and I don't need to do boring translations to learn for free :P

Check their video in NYC BigApps3.0 site.

[fallofshadows]

@ken1noob Like he said, you never know which word in the captcha is the one the computer knows, and which one is the one the computer doesn't know. So yes, you could sit around doing captchas until you finally guess the right word and input false information for the other, but it would take thousands upon thousands of people doing this to alter the word. Plus, most people won't do that: they want to gain access to the forums they're signing up for, not mess up some large project.

[ken1noob]

So... what happens if we all type one word correctly and for the other put, I don't know, pie? Won't the computer feel confident that every word in the book is pie?

[OceanderTethyseus]

so now instead of every person wasting 10 seconds per captcha, they're wasting 20 seconds per captcha.