Tag Archives: Senior Software Test Engineer
VizWiz: what the crowd sees is what you get
June 9, 2011… fact that OCR scanners can’t read old and/or handwritten documents. Similarly speech-recognition software, which converts sound to text, often fails to understand strong accents and multiple voices (ideal if you just happen to be a lonely elocution expert). Bigham’s solution is to backup the “fragile” technology with help from online workers (or as he calls them “always-available human-powered services technology”).
To test the theory Bigham and his team created VizWiz, an …
War Games (or how the US military learned to love the crowd)
April 26, 2011… The agency only launched its first crowd-based experiment in 2009 – an open competition to test whether online social networks could be used to gather precise data. DARPA released 10 red weather balloons at secret locations across the U.S. The first team to pinpoint the coordinates of all of them was offered a $40,000 prize. Using Facebook, Twitter, public radio and good old-fashioned bribery, the winning team tracked down every balloon in an impressive 9 hours.
Obviously impressed …
Language Lessons: translating the global conversation
February 21, 2011… from being humble adding machines. These days hardware is lightweight and good looking, while some software is so sophisticated it practically comes with Michelin stars. Despite all this progress, one area where machines have traditionally struggled is language translation (remember the bad old days of Alta Vista’s Babel Fish?).
The problem is that human languages are too complex to be easily broken down into computer-proof algorithms. However, as we’ve discussed before, machine …
2010: A year not lost on the crowd
December 26, 2010… apps. The constant hustle is less secure but more exhilarating: you want to be a crime fighter, a software engineer, a video star, a music sensation, a day trader, an entrepreneur, a journalist — the gatekeepers have had to hand over the keys.”
Without specifically referring to distributed work (or even the internet) Ms Gibbs sums up the trend which has spawned crowdsourcing as an industry. Although distributed work itself is not new, the proliferation of high-speed internet access …
AudioDraft: for a better sounding business
December 21, 2010… felt it still lacked that extra spark you get from a really toe-tapping tune.
Harry Seppälä, Senior Designer at Microtask and the man responsible for the original animation, decided to put AudioDraft users to test. He drafted a concise yet informative brief, instructing would-be composers to give their tracks a slightly theatrical, old-fashioned feel. He also threw in links to a few Walt Disney cartoons (all master classes in incidental music) for added inspiration.
Results were …
← Older posts Newer posts →
