Luis von Ahn Carnegie Mellon University CAPTCHA Verification

Luis von Ahn Carnegie Mellon University

“CAPTCHA” Verification technology developed in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University

“ Help! I’ve been waiting for 20 minutes, and nothing happens ” Verification technology developed in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University

Verification technology developed in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University

QUICKVOTE Which is the best Computer Science Grad School in the US? Berkeley MIT CMU Washington Cornell Stanford vote (From www. slashdot. org)

Verification technology developed in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University

CAPTCHA Sweat Shops Spam companies hire humans to type CAPTCHAs all day long $2. 50 per hour for each human 720 captchas per hour per human 1/3 cent per account

OR F E T O V S I U L 2012

Roughly 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed every day 10 s of human time per CAPTCHA Can we use this human effort for good?

Digitizing Books Scan OCR DE xi Ii ARIi. . COPBCtr. AGE, De. C. I l 1 QOn. Tlie royal palace at Frieclericheberg took fire last night. The li. ing himself directed the operations fns extinguishing the lire. The whole structure ���, �������, ed.

Scanned book Word that OCR can’t read Randomly distorted image of word

Free

Words Digitized Per Day 20 000 18 000 16 000 14 000 12 000 10 000 8 000 6 000 4 000 2 000 8 6. 24 . 0 8. 0 5. 24 8. 0 24 4. 24 . 0 8 8 3. 24 . 0 8. 0 1. 24 07 12 . 2 4. 07 4. . 2 11 . 2 4. 07 7 10 9. 24 . 0 7. 0 24 8. 7. 24 . 0 7 7. 0 24 6. 5. 24 . 0 7 0

Where do the Words Come From? Years 1851 -1980 will be completed in 2009

400, 000 (6% of the world’s population)

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