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ReCAPTCHA Challenge Response System

janoszd — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 19:51:32 +0000

No doubt you’ve had to type something in response to something like this when you wanted to cast an online vote, buy some tickets, sign up for a new account, or take care of some other task in your online life:

Image via Donielle's flickr photostream

This is called a CAPTCHA and it is a challenge response system designed to cut down automated spam on the web. CAPTCHA is an acronym that stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Many developers have come up with such systems since its original invention and naming back in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford at Carnegie Mellon University. Yet, there is something very notable and unique about the “reCAPTCHA” brand of CAPTCHAs that piqued my interest.

In the case of reCAPTCHA, when a human types a solution into the box it is checked against a database of unsolved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text from old books, magazines, and transcripts of old radio programs. As more people look at the text, which is not recognizable by computers with OCR software, and enter their response, those common responses are returned as correct responses to the system and onward you go! Each solved word then gets returned to a database to help figure out the missing text which was previously unrecognized by a computer.

Google acquired reCAPTCHA in 2009 in an effort to aid its book digitization and you can read more about the technology on Google’s reCAPTCHA page. There is a short video about the technology in the own words of one of its developers here.

It’s great when one technology can solve two problems, and that is the lesson that our young people can learn from the reCAPTCHA story. Think about some other technologies that came to popularity because they addressed two or more previously disconnected problems. This is the stuff that results from great knowledge, creativity, and ingenuity.

Real “American Idols”

janoszd — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 12:27:14 +0000

Most Americans can name and recognize six American Idol television show winners before they could these six individuals:

Mark Zuckerberg

Sergey Brin

Larry Page

Steve Chen

Chad Hurley

Jawed Karim

What do these thirty-something men have in common? They invented the ways we are living our lives online. Zuckerberg founded Facebook, Brin and Page founded Google, and Chen, Hurley, and Karim invented YouTube. What else do they have in common? They all brought these things into our consciousness based originally on projects they developed relatively early in their lives…a graduate school project…a side project while an undergrad…in a garage with others they met at one of their first jobs or in college.

What’s wrong with this picture? There’s not a woman, an African American, nor a Hispanic American among them.

Another thing these guys have in common is that they were all within the past few years sitting in a public high school somewhere in the United States receiving an education. I wonder what they would each say about how their school experience helped them in their career endeavors. I understand that Chad Hurley was involved in the Technology Student Association when he was in high school. I’m not trying to suggest that his involvement in TSA alone was the key to his success, yet one would have to admit that that the goals of Technology Education and TSA are closely aligned to the development of students’ ingenuity.

I also should not suggest that young people idolize these individuals. Just as we shouldn’t teach young people to idolize professional athletes, we shouldn’t teach them to idolize anyone in the media as everyone has their faults including these people I’m sure. But, if we teach young people to idolize anything, let’s make it the ideals of ingenuity, and let’s teach them the lessons of how these relatively young people were able to bring their ideas to the forefront and literally change the world.

William Kamkwamba

janoszd — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 01:04:32 +0000

The first time I heard of William Kamkwamba was when he appeared on the Daily Show back in October 2009, shortly after his book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind was published. To hear even a brief part of the story about how William had constructed a wind powered turbine in his village in Malawi set me out to buy the book. I remember him pondering during the interview, “where was Google all this time?” To read the entire book, however, set me out to change my perspective on student motivation among some other ideas related to ingenuity.

William had started to develop the wind turbine at age fourteen. But, more interesting than that were the events that led up to that point in time. Not every child in Malawi goes to school. William was one that understood the opportunity he had when his family was able to enroll him in a primary school. He was a hard worker in school and seems to have appreciated every bit of knowledge that came his way through his formal education experience.

By about the time he finished the eighth grade in 2001-02, severe famine had struck the country. His family, being agrarian, could no longer support the fees required for William to keep attending school. The book describes in great detail how William and his family got through those two years, surviving on just a few bites of food, if even that, per day.

The first thing we can learn from William’s story is about motivation. The severe famine that had hit and the hunger pains he literally felt made him wonder about solutions to the problem. He thought that if he could find a way to irrigate the crops that he could help solve the problem. But, to do that you’d need power to pump the water. So, William was more motivated to solve a problem than perhaps anyone could possibly be.

When William set out to learn about energy and power he came across several textbooks on related topics. I think many people miss the true genius of William. It wasn’t as if the text materials he read contained a set of plans that explained how he could build a wind turbine from materials laying around a village in a developing country. What William did was he applied the sort of ingenuity I wish every one of our children could develop. He read about the concepts and then set out to find the things that fit his needs…an old bicycle dynamo to serve as the generator…old automobile parts and metal garnered from trips to the scrap yard…some other tools and parts from his father’s farming materials and others from around the house. From these “unusable,” even in a developing country, items he fashioned a full power generation system complete with a circuit breaker. Imagine the pride and delight he must have felt when the family radio powered up for the first time with electricity from his wind turbine.

Our young people can learn a lot from an individual like William Kamkwamba and the stories he has to tell. I’d say the book is definitely appropriate for a high school level student on up through adults.

You can also learn more about William in his own words from this TED Talk and this short documentary called Moving Windmills.