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News Release 11-255

NSF Joins in Targeting Educators to Celebrate Computer Science Education Week 2011

Biweekly CS Bits & Bytes will spotlight NSF-funded research and offer teachers and parents student-friendly activities and curriculum ideas

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Luis von Ahn holding a laptop blocking his face with an image of his face in the monitor.

Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Melon is the first issue of CS Bits & Bytes' featured computer scientist. He is a pioneer in the field of "Human Computation," often called "Crowdsourcing," which combines the use of human skills and abilities in a novel way to solve large-scale computational problems. Digitizing text is just one example of a problem that can be solved by harnessing the combined power of humans and computers that would be impossible for either to solve alone. This practice is called "CAPTCHA" which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The other word is a "reCAPTCHA" and is an image of a word from text that automated software was unable to recognize.

Credit: Luis von Ahn


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