In one of my news feeds today, there were some references to the Captcha program. It turns out, that the Captcha program, that’s used on hundreds and thousands of websites every day, has been redeveloped by one of the creators and fully expanded for all new uses, rather than security and wasting everyone’s time. Although reCaptcha isn’t anything new, some of its achievements have been fantastic. Looking back all those years ago Captcha has been around, Luis von Ahn brought some history to light that impressed me.
von Ahn was one of the original creators of Captcha at Carnegie Mellon. Captcha was just a way of authenticating users online, especially when they make profiles and online accounts on websites and online services. Captcha provides a base layer of security to filter out bots and spambots from the system entries and basically “wastes 10 seconds of your time,” according to von Ahn. As many companies and individuals have said, time is money. For researchers like von Ahn, wasted time is more costly than wasted money, because we, as humans, have capacity and lots of potential. Hence, the reCaptcha program came about. Through the reCaptcha system, when users authenticate their actions online, they are not only making their actions safer, but one of the two words has been scanned out of a book and is in need of interpretation, because computers cannot read scanned text very well. This whole process, by using user input for recognizing words, is all about digitizing millions of books from the library to the web. This project helps train computers and helps utilize the 10 seconds of wasted time and change it into 10 seconds well spent. The project has interpreted billions of words so far today, and can fully translate 2.5 million books per year at its current rate. Crowd-sourcing at its finest has proven that time is a rare commodity, and when acquired, can be utilized for some great projects.
There has also been some development into Dual Lingo, which was another side project by von Ahn. This project utilizes a reCaptcha like program to help people learn words, phrases, and comprehension in other languages. His argument for the project was that programs like Rosetta Stone, that people purchase and spends hundreds of dollars on, discriminates against people who cannot afford the expensive software, especially the poor. This Dual Lingo project helps students learn new languages without having to break the bank. Students learn through activities that work much the reCaptcha interpretation system, but rather the words coming from literature in American libraries, the text comes from online webpages and Wikipedia pages that are written in one language, and could be translated into other languages. If 1 million people spent some short amount of time playing with the Dual Lingo program, they will not only learn just as well without Rosetta Stone software, but they have the capability to translate every English Wikipedia page into Spanish in just over 80 hours.
If this kind of technology is being used right now to translate basic websites, perhaps this technology can be used to translate websites like the UN and other NGOs who are currently struggling to keep their sites up to par with all the visitors that stop by their websites. To me, this tech can be repurposed to so many applications, bringing back the idea of crowd-sourced information processing that was somewhat used on Twitter during natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, translating Haitian Creole into other languages for aid workers.
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