In the fall of 2000, as the first dot-com bubble was bursting, the Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn attended a talk, at Carnegie Mellon, about ten problems that Yahoo couldn't solve. Von Ahn, who had just begun his Ph.D., liked solving problems. He had planned to study math until he realized that many mathematicians were still toiling away over questions that had proved unanswerable for centuries. "I talked to some computer-science professors and they would say, 'Oh, yeah, I solved an open problem last week,' " he told me recently. "That seemed just a lot more interesting."

Language learning has surged during the pandemic. Duolingo, which is synonymous with gamified language learning, saw its fastest growth period this March, with a 101% global increase in new users. From those who simply have more time on their hands to students trying to keep up during the pandemic school year, the app is a huge boon. All that extra data isn't going to waste -- because Duolingo invested early in AI, the app keeps getting better as it grows beyond the 30 million monthly active users reported in December 2019. "One of the things people don't know is that even though Duolingo is very gamified and it just looks very cutesy, we actually record everything you do to try to basically have a model of what you know," Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn told VentureBeat. We spoke to von Ahn about all the ways Duolingo uses AI and then followed up with the company's research director, Burr Settles, who joined in 2013 (Duolingo was founded in 2012). "We hired this guy named Burr who has a Ph.D. in AI," von Ahn said when describing the company's first foray into AI. "He came in and the idea was'Try to figure out how to use AI to improve Duolingo.'" We've already done deep dives into how Duolingo uses AI to humanize virtual language lessons and to drive its English proficiency tests.

Much has been made of the "food boom" in Pittsburgh, and the city has long had a thriving arts scene. But perhaps the secret, underlying driver for both the economy and the cool factor -- the reason Pittsburgh now gets mentioned alongside Brooklyn and Portland, Ore., as an urban hot spot for millennials -- isn't chefs or artists but geeks. In a 2014 article in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mayor Bill Peduto compared Carnegie Mellon, along with the University of Pittsburgh, to the iron ore factories that made this city an industrial power in the 19th century. The schools are the local resource "churning out that talent" from which the city is fueled. Because of the top students and research professors at Carnegie Mellon, tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Uber have opened offices here.

The experience of squinting at distorted text, puzzling over small images, or even simply clicking on a checkbox to prove you aren't a robot could soon be over, if a new Google service takes off. The company has revealed the latest evolution of the Captcha (short, sort of, for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which aims to do away with any interruption at all: the new, "invisible reCaptcha" aims to tell whether a given visitor is a robot or not purely by analysing their browsing behaviour. Barring a short wait while the system does its job, a typical human visitor shouldn't have to do anything else to prove they're not a robot. It's a long way from the first Captchas, introduced to stop automated programs signing up for services like email addresses and social media accounts. The idea is simple: pick a task that a human can do easily, and a machine finds very hard, and require that task be completed before the process can be continued.

U.S. researchers have released a new online program for automatically tagging images according to their content. In its first real-world test, the program processed thousands of publicly accessible images available on the photo-sharing site Flickr. At least one accurate tag was generated for 98 percent of all the pictures analysed. The new software, called ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures), uses a combination of statistical techniques to process an image and assign it a batch of 15 words, arranged in order of perceived relevance. These words may refer to a specific object within the picture, such as a "person" or "car," or to a more general theme, such as "outdoors" or "manmade."

A US-based start-up claims to have broken security tests used to tell humans and computers apart online. Vicarious said it had developed technology, based on the human brain, which could solve text-based Captcha tests 90% of the time. A Captcha is a graphic or sound users must type on to a web page to prove they are human. The company said its artificial intelligence software can also perceive images. The company said it had used its Recursive Cortical Network software to solve Captcha tests as a step towards thinking machines, not for nefarious purposes.

If you want to get something done with a computer, it turns out, there are better ways to do it than laboriously type out conversational sentences to be read by a programme with a shaky grasp of the language and a gratingly affected sense of humour. So I'm as surprised as anyone that for the past week, I've started every morning with a 10 minute conversation with a chatbot. The bot is the creation of Pittsburgh-based language-learning startup Duolingo, and it's the first major change for the company's app since it launched four years ago. In that time, the service has gained 150 million users, and stuck stubbornly to the top of the educational app charts on every platform it's available on. If you haven't used Duolingo, the premise is simple: five to 20 minutes of interactive training a day is enough to learn a language.

Recommender systems learn about our preferences to make targeted suggestions. In this paper we outline a novel game-with-a-purpose designed to infer preferences at scale as a side-effect of gameplay. We evaluate the utility of this data in a recommendation context as part of a small live-user trial.

Further, the raw data collected For a company to survive, it is important to develop new by these games are usually in the form of a word or products and services appealing to consumers. Thus, the a phrase, rather than lengthy sentences typical in ordinary company must comprehend the preferences of target consumers, questionnaires, and game logs are also available as supplemental for example, by capturing how they perceive related data. Thus, it will be easier to convert the raw products currently available in the market.

We define metaphor computing as a way to transform difficult computational problems into easier human-solvable problems, and transform solutions back into computational solutions. This report explores initial ideas.