

Interview: Luis von Ahn on Duolingo - large-scale, crowdsourced translation - misener
http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2011/11/full-interview-luis-von-ahn-on-duolingo/

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antics
Technical note on the terminology here. Just FYI, this is not strictly
speaking crowdsourcing. Just like outsourcing refers to replacing local
workers with workers in a foreign country, crowdsourcing refers to replacing
people who have a job with generic members of the public. Amazon's Mechanical
Turk is crowdsourcing.

von Ahn's area of work is in _human computation_ , which specifically refers
to the augmentation or replacement of some part of a computer-based
computation process with human calculation. CAPTCHA is a good example of human
computation, because it augments the problem of OCR by sourcing the
identification of OCR-hard characters to people on a massive and automatic
basis. Human computation allows you to formulate algorithms that are too hard
for computers to do and too laborious for people to do into a sort of
"average" between the two. This gives you a lot of leverage and allows you to
do some neat stuff, like the above.

If you didn't know, von Ahn's main claim to fame is having founded re-CAPTCHA
and then having marshaled the company through a successful Google acquisition.
After that I think he became professor at CMU, where he is currently.

EDIT: a more scholarly examination of the differences between human
computation and related fields is here:

[http://alexquinn.org/papers/Human%20Computation,%20A%20Surve...](http://alexquinn.org/papers/Human%20Computation,%20A%20Survey%20and%20Taxonomy%20of%20a%20Growing%20Field%20\(CHI%202011\).pdf)

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jchonphoenix
He was a Phd student at CMU then a Professor first before Google.

Source: I was there and doing research for him when all this happened.

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antics
Yeah, he was one of Manuel Blum's students, with whom he invented CAPTCHA. Do
you know if he did a post-doc somewhere?

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goozer32
Private beta seems to have started: <http://duolingo.com> The video is
awesome.

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amichail
Duolingo related questions on Quora: <http://www.quora.com/Duolingo>

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jerfelix
The end result of Duolingo would be a multitude of translation examples, which
should be a huge benefit toward teaching machines how to translate.

I listened to the interview, read the website, and read through the quora
page, and didn't notice this even mentioned. Did I miss it?

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amichail
It was in the interview.

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thedjpetersen
This is pretty awesome. I am very curious about language learning especially
if it can be made more addictive(I have started playing with it myself
<http://thedjpetersen.github.com/playground/language_game/>). I especially
love the concept they are presenting I would like to see how they design the
interface. How easy it is to go from sentence to sentence.

I have always thought that if you could simplify language learning enough and
maybe add some of the addictive game elements that games like World of
Warcraft have, people would not look at it as a chore but rather pour
themselves into to it.

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wesleyk
von Ahn gave a talk at Carnegie Mellon last spring on Duolingo as well:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4>

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nickpinkston
Yea, that was a great talk - I was there. I love the n-sided task arbitrages
this guys comes up with. Is there a word for these? I mean "games for good" is
a subset, crowdsourcing a superset, but is there anything more specific?

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gozzoo
this is a TED talk from the same guy
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4>

