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Two interesting, imaginative, practical and visionary talk on computer science a
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The first talk is by Prof. Luis von Ahn who is barely over 30 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_von_Ahn , recipient of the MacArthur genius grant, and professor at Carnegie Mellon University entitled “Human Computation”. Although you may not have heard of his name but you surely must have encountered his invention “Captcha”. This is the dialog box that appears every time you try to register, to vote, or transact some financial matters on line. The box contains a few script and not printed alphabet characters which we are asked to type in to verify that it is a human being that is interacting with the computer (The reason is that computer software cannot as yet recognize such script and not-printed characters despite advances in OCR technology. Using such “Captcha” box will prevent automated software from monopolizing votes, accounts, etc.) Every day it is estimated that 200 million such entries are made all over the world on the Internet. At an average of 10 seconds of human effort per entry, this comes out to approximately of 500,000 man-hours per day “wasted”. Von Ahn want to see if he can put to use such large amount of man-hours for social good. The solution he comes up with is ingenious. It turns out that several organizations such as Google and Amazom.com wants to digitize all the books ever published. However, books published before the year 1900 are difficult for computer to read and recognize due to poor print quality. So instead of supplying random words to the captcha boxes for human beings to read and type, his company now supplies words from these old printed books instead. This simple idea (many implementation details omitted here) is working well and expects to finish digitize all books in seven years using these “wasted” and “free” human effort all over the world. In his talk he talked about additional clever ideas (called “CROWD SOURCING” - using free human power and knowledge available on the Internet) to label pictures and do machine translation.
The second talk is an excellent visionary discourse by an established computer expert, Academician Prof. Ed Lazowska on “The Past, Present, and Future of Computer Science”. He started the talk by asking the audience “what are the three major human events in 1969?” Most people can correctly identify the Apollo moon landing, other more culturally and US-centered remembered the Woodstock festival that initiated the sexual revolution in the US. Only very few older technical persons like myself knows it is also the year the Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet had her birth and the first remote command was sent from UCLA to a computer in Cambridge MA. Forty one years later, without question which one of the three events changed the course of history and human development.
From this vantage point, Lazowska reviewed succinctly and impressively the accomplishment of computer science over the past forty years in particular the past decade. He predicted more spectacular advances in the next ten years. Here his prediction converges with that of the von Ahn talk above. From his position as the chairman of the Computer Community Consortium (CCC), a nationally chartered technical group to advise the US government and coordinate CS research and development initiatives, he sketched out the next ten years in terms of trends and directions:
1. eScience, a data driven science. In oceanography, cosmology, biology, and other sciences we are facing a data tsunami of multi terra bytes collected per day. Converting these data to knowledge will be an major undertaking and benefit
2. Crowd sourcing which I already mentioned above. He pointed out that major projects in history such as building the pyramids, the panama canal, etc never involve more than 100,000 persons simultaneously due to the difficulties of command and communication. With the Internet, we can coordinate billions. Think of the possibilities!
3. SMARTs will be put into everything from transportation to energy to medicine
4. Most of these advances will be done by students and young people who did not do computer programming in high school or even universities. The advances in CS will be ideas not technical dependent details.
Both talks were lavishly illustrated with PowerPoint graphics and animation, carefully prepared and delivered according to the best rules of speech giving. As a student of giving talks, I was very impressed and secretly glad that I do not have to compete with such speakers. Both talks were video taped for broadcast on the Internet later. If ScienceNet readers have the opportunity and interest, they are both worth watching. The first talk was sponsored by “The Internet and Society” program of the Berkman Center of Harvard Law School and the second by the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. Those of you who are interested are encouraged to do a little detective work on your own to locate the URL for streaming the broadcasts.
People sometimes called Cambridge, MA (city where MIT and Harvard are both located) the intellectual capital of the US. Everyday excellent talks accessible to general scientific audiences are available. In fact I had to choose between the Lazowska talk and another general talk on “Energy and Smart Grid” at Boston University taking place at the same time. But such are the “embarrassing riches” available to a retired but engaged person like me living here. I continuously feel being alive and enriched.
https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-318162.html
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