Speakers

Opening Plenary Speaker

Duolingo: Learn a Language for Free while Helping to Translate the Web

I want to translate the Web into every major language: every webpage, every video, and, yes, even Justin Bieber's tweets.

With its content split up into hundreds of languages -- and with over 50% of it in English -- most of the Web is inaccessible to most people in the world. This problem is pressing, now more than ever, with millions of people from China, Russia, Latin America and other quickly developing regions entering the Web. In this talk, I introduce my new project, called Duolingo, which aims at breaking this language barrier, and thus making the Web truly "world wide."

We have all seen how systems such as Google Translate are improving every day at translating the gist of things written in other languages. Unfortunately, they are not yet accurate enough for my purpose: Even when what they spit out is intelligible, it's so badly written that I can't read more than a few lines before getting a headache.

With Duolingo, our goal is to encourage people, like you and me, to translate the Web into their native languages.

Duolingo: Learn a Language for Free while Helping to Translate the Web

Bio

Luis von Ahn is the A. Nico Habermann Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is working to develop a new area of computer science that he calls Human Computation, which aims to build systems that combine the intelligence of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone.

An example of his work is reCAPTCHA, in which over one billion people -- 15% of humanity -- have helped digitize books and newspapers.

Among his many honors are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship, the ACM Grace Hopper Award, and CMU's Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence and Alan J. Perlis Teaching Award. He has been named one of the "50 Best Brains in Science" by Discover Magazine, one of the 50 most influential people in technology by silicon.com, and one of the "Brilliant 10 Scientists" by Popular Science Magazine.

Closing Plenary Speaker

How Mobile Disrupts Social As We Know it

Every computer revolution changes our lives dramatically; so will mobile devices. Mobile devices enable billions of people to capture, share, interact, and consume real-time personal media in new and creative ways. In addition, being devices owned by individuals, they can form an autonomous computing fabric that frees us from the domination of existing centralized proprietary social networking services.

This talk presents a system architecture called Musubi (Mobile, Social, and UBIquitous) that combines a novel and natural mobile social experience with a clean architecture that lets users choose different cloud backup services. In addition, Musubi is an app platform that makes it easy to create privacy-honoring social apps. This can open up new markets for social and collaborative apps in fields like education, health and businesses, where centralized proprietary services are inappropriate. A fully working prototype of Musubi is available on both the Android and iPhone app store (link).

Bio

Monica S. Lam has been a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University since 1988, and the Faculty Director of the Stanford MobiSocial Computing Laboratory. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Her current research interest is in creating open social computing platforms. She has worked in the areas of high-performance computing, computer architecture, compiler optimizations, security analysis, virtualization-based computer management, and mobile/social software architectures. She is a co-author of the "Dragon Book". Together with her students, she founded MokaFive Inc. in 2005 and MobiSocial Inc. in 2012. Monica is an ACM Fellow.