Captcha lecture

Today, I went to one of free lecture series in UofT.
The lecture began a bit later than it was scheduled which was good because my alarm didn't go off and I was late. Luckily, I was able to make it in time.
I asked my friend from ISM to go together. He was there talking to a Chinese girl who's doing her computer science PhD in UofT.
The lecturer was the guy named Luis von Ahn, who invented Captcha and is a professor in Carnegie Mellon University. I was surprised that he is very young like my age. He must be smart.
Even though I am not really into computer things any more, the lecture was quite interesting and entertaining. I didn't know This reCAPTCHA system is being used to aid in the conversion of scanned images into digital text. He said that because computer OCR system isn't perfect, so it makes some mistakes while scanning some texts. So reCAPTCHA system makes us finish that job. When you type letters of distorted image, the system keeps what you typed and uses to decode some images which computers didn't recognize.



Doesn't it sound different?
It's usually the other way, isn't it?
Since the computer was invented, it always assists and helps human get jobs done. With that system, we, human being, aid computers with an ability which human only has.
The lecturer told us about another project they are doing. That is image labeling.
If you use image search on Google, sometimes you can see some images which doesn't relate to what you typed. So, the team made an online game to improve accuracy of image search.
You can go to http://www.espgame.org to figure out how people contributes to that.
How the game works is player see images and types words coming to their mind.
I didn't get the fun part of the game but he said a lot of people play that game every day.
The words were typed are being collected and used for image labeling, so you play the game as well as you support image labeling.
I found it very interesting because image labeling itself would be very boring and repetitive job like typing and you also have to pay people for that.
But with that game and the background system, they can collect data for image labeling without paying them and people can also have fun with that game.
What an idea it is.

I thought the lecture was two and half hours long but it turned out it was just for an hour.
So, my friend and I went for lunch afterwards. He said that he's learned new words today since he's not young guy to follow all new computer words.
Sometimes, computer things evolve too fast, so even I can't catch up. But we don't need to know everything about computers. It's just too much somtimes. Haha.

Tomorrow, there are two lectures open to public. I think I will go at least for one. The one which is about environment issues.