Users Are Part of Your Systems

Computerworld — You can play a video game called Fold.it on the Web while making important contributions to science. Understanding how 3-D proteins "fold" into their optimum structures is critical to understanding disease, but it's difficult computationally because there are an astronomical number of possible folds for most proteins.

The thousands of people who play Fold.it use their pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving skills to predict protein structures in a way computers can't easily duplicate. "Teenaged gamers are beating the pants off Ph.D. biochemists," says Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, where Fold.it was created.

Fold.it is an example of two enormously important trends. One is the marriage of computer science with other sciences such as biology, and the other is the emergence of hybrid systems in which people are not just users, but integral parts of the system.

I recently visited the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University and was briefed on a dozen or so projects, all involving at least three disciplines. For example, biologists, linguists and computer scientists have combined medical models, language analysis tools and machine learning to understand the "language" of molecules and thereby detect the chemical signals of organ transplant rejection. A researcher said she couldn't imagine making progress without all those disciplines working together.

That same week, I attended a seminar on advanced applications of computer science, sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium. Alfred Spector, research vice president at Google, spoke of his company's vast "cloud" that not only computes but also taps into the intelligence of millions of users in order to make Google applications work better. He advised, "The focus of design should not be on the computer and software itself, but rather the computer and software in conjunction with its user community."

Then Luis von Ahn from Carnegie Mellon described his reCAPTCHA project. He's the inventor of CAPTCHAs, those distorted words on Web registration forms that people can read but computers can't. He figured out how to help digitize The New York Times' paper archives by harnessing the energy that millions of people collectively spend on this security measure every day. Words that the Times' optical character recognition software can't read are sent to a free CAPTCHA engine used by various Web services. Users are now deciphering 35 million words a day as they process these CAPTCHAs. Von Ahn says the job, which would have taken years with human editors, will be finished in just a few months.

Continue Reading