Two projects of mass online collaboration
In the courtyard of the 21st century. According to the predictions of science fiction writers of the 20th century, we must live with flying cars outside the window and robots that do everything for us, or even fly to other star systems in general. Unfortunately, this is not the case. But some fiction writers failed to predict, more precisely, they could not predict the impact that the Internet had on society and civilization as a whole. I will not be able to describe the impact of the Internet on society, this will require not one hundred “habraposposts”, or even more, but I will highlight an interesting direction for me, namely crowdsourcing.
I will probably begin with a story about the CAPTCHA project. This project is familiar not only to IT specialists, but also to every Internet user. He annoys everyone, but without him our life would be terrible. Number of spam would be many times more. But it was just such an annoying project like CAPTCHA that pushed Louis von Ana from Carnegie Mellon University to create a reCAPTCHA project. This project also had a bots protection feature. Added one component, invisible to ordinary users - help in digitizing the texts of books. Now when entering text from a picture, the user is prompted to enter two words. The first is already known to the system, and the second word to the system is unknown and it is not able to recognize it by the text recognition program. The second word is taken from a source requiring recognition (for example, a book). Check and passage of "captcha" is carried out according to the word that is known to the system. It is not necessary to enter an unknown word, since the result is fixed based on statistics, and not on the response of one user, which allows you to choose the correct option. In September 2009, reCAPTCHA was acquired by Google . And in the spring of 2012, Google launched an experiment on image recognition from Google Maps and Google Street View using the reCAPTCHA service.
Continue reading under the cut.
Found another ancient post on Habré: How does reCAPTCHA work? (he is very informative).
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All this and much more Louis von An says in his speech at the TED conference:
In this speech, Louis begins to talk about the project Duolingo , about him earlier wrote black_bunny . I will not retell what has already been written, I will only add that at the moment this project has advanced far ahead, and these guys, exploiting hundreds of millions of people around the world, have become my idols. This is a demonstration of how ideas are changing the world, and most importantly, now even a small group of people can change the world, creating a service for online interaction and collaboration of people around the world.
I will probably begin with a story about the CAPTCHA project. This project is familiar not only to IT specialists, but also to every Internet user. He annoys everyone, but without him our life would be terrible. Number of spam would be many times more. But it was just such an annoying project like CAPTCHA that pushed Louis von Ana from Carnegie Mellon University to create a reCAPTCHA project. This project also had a bots protection feature. Added one component, invisible to ordinary users - help in digitizing the texts of books. Now when entering text from a picture, the user is prompted to enter two words. The first is already known to the system, and the second word to the system is unknown and it is not able to recognize it by the text recognition program. The second word is taken from a source requiring recognition (for example, a book). Check and passage of "captcha" is carried out according to the word that is known to the system. It is not necessary to enter an unknown word, since the result is fixed based on statistics, and not on the response of one user, which allows you to choose the correct option. In September 2009, reCAPTCHA was acquired by Google . And in the spring of 2012, Google launched an experiment on image recognition from Google Maps and Google Street View using the reCAPTCHA service.
Continue reading under the cut.
Found another ancient post on Habré: How does reCAPTCHA work? (he is very informative).
')
All this and much more Louis von An says in his speech at the TED conference:
In this speech, Louis begins to talk about the project Duolingo , about him earlier wrote black_bunny . I will not retell what has already been written, I will only add that at the moment this project has advanced far ahead, and these guys, exploiting hundreds of millions of people around the world, have become my idols. This is a demonstration of how ideas are changing the world, and most importantly, now even a small group of people can change the world, creating a service for online interaction and collaboration of people around the world.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/222345/
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