Human Computation
Human Computation (HC) is a relatively new area of computer science which studies how to harness the combined power of humans and computers to solve problems that would be impossible for either to solve alone.
Luis Von Ahn, one of the pioneers of this research area, harnessed human brain power of millions of users over the internet for free to complete in less than two years (using HC projects such as Captcha, ReCaptcha, and WGAP) monumental tasks such as labeling all images over the internet, or digitize all the books of the New York Times archive.
Currently, Von Ahn and his team are working on Duolingo, a site to help people learn different languages over the internet for free. The final goal of this proyect is to translate all the content over the internet into several languages. His first goal is to translate all english content of wikipedia to several languages in a few months.
As you can notice, I've been following Von Ahn project development, as I believe that Human Computation is the answer for a lot of current open problems in computer science. Regarding this I have been thinking about a project to create a method to improve the search over the internet.
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