[BANANA] ASC ITS Lecture - May 28, 2008, Dr. Luis von Ahn

[Jane Mcnamara]

ASC Institute for Terascale Simulation
Lecture Series 2008

"Human Computation"

Dr. Luis von Ahn
Carnegie Mellon University

Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Building 453 Auditorium
2:00pm
(Property protection area. Foreign national 
temporary escorted building access procedures apply)


ABSTRACT:
Over 200 million hours are spent playing computer 
and video games every day in the United States. 
Indeed, by age 21, the average American has spent 
over 10,000 hours playing such games ­ at eight 
hours per day and five days per week, that's 
equivalent to five years of working a full time job.

What if this time and energy could be channeled 
into useful work? What if people could play 
computer games and accomplish work without even 
realizing it? What if billions of people 
collaborated to solve important problems for 
humanity or generate training data for computers? 
My work aims at a general paradigm for doing 
exactly that: utilizing human processing power to 
solve computational problems in a distributed manner.

In particular, I focus on harnessing human time 
and energy for addressing problems that computers 
cannot yet solve. Although computers have 
advanced dramatically in many respects over the 
last 50 years, they still do not possess the 
basic conceptual intelligence or perceptual 
capabilities that most humans take for granted. 
By leveraging human skills and abilities in a 
novel way, I want to solve large-scale 
computational problems and/or collect training 
data to teach computers many of these human 
talents. To this end, I treat human brains as 
processors in a distributed system, each 
performing a small part of a massive computation. 
Unlike computer processors, however, humans 
require an incentive in order to become part of a 
collective computation. Among other things, I use 
online games as a means to encourage participation in the process.

In this talk, I will describe my work in the area of Human Computation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Dr. Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the 
Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon 
University, where he also received his Ph.D. in 
2005. He is the recipient of a MacArthur 
Fellowship, and was named one of Popular Science 
Magazine's "Brilliant 10" scientists of 2006. Dr. 
von Ahn has also been named one of the 50 most 
influential people in technology by silicon.com 
in 2007. His research interests include 
encouraging people to do work for free, as well 
as catching and thwarting cheaters in online 
environments. His work has appeared in over 100 
news outlets including The New York Times, CNN, 
USA Today, The BBC, and The Discovery Channel.


Technical Host: Tina Eliassi-Rad (925) 422-1552
Administrative Contact: Jane McNamara (925) 424-2266



Jane McNamara
Institute for Scientific Computing Research (ISCR)
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
7000 East Avenue
Livermore, CA  94550
L-419, T/3724
(925) 424-2266 Phone
(925) 422-7819 Fax


--------------------------------------------------------
Jane McNamara
Institute for Scientific Computing Research (ISCR)
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
7000 East Avenue
Livermore, CA  94550
L-419, T/3724
(925) 424-2266 Phone
(925) 422-7819 Fax
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