Luis von Ahn, et al. Make the Cover of Science Magazine
The cover article for the current (October September 12, 2008) issue of Science features reCAPTCHA! The article, authored by Luis von Ahn, Benjamin Maurer, Colin McMillen, David Abraham, and Manuel Blum, presents the scientific principles underlying reCAPTCHA, along with some of the engineering challenges.
It’s a real accomplishment for any scientist to get a research article published in Science magazine, let alone get the cover. Oh, and it is a very cool cover photo:
(In case you don’t know, reCAPTCHA uses “human computation” to simultaneously stop spam and digitize the world’s books.)
Seeing this article raises the question of why computer science research is not featured more prominently in places like Science, Nature, and the PNAS. Science has had more computing-related research articles than Nature or PNAS, but none have had what I would think of as appropriate “representation” of CS. I suspect this is just a historical accident and now is mostly a matter of habit. On the other hand, I think it has become important for the field of computer science to have a presence in these publications. One reason for this is given by Peter Harsha, the director of government affairs for the Computing Research Association. He tells me that these publications are far more likely to make an impact on congressional staffers and major media outlets than any computer science journals or proceedings. To the extent that computer science needs to improve public perception and understanding of the field, as well as convince the government to improve research funding, it seems that taking our work to these publications could be helpful. Not just for computer science but for all sciences.
I’ve gotten interested enough in this issue that I’m planning to talk to some of the editors of these publications, to find out more about why computer science articles are relatively rare. Probably there are some editorial issues, but mainly this is likely to be a case of computer scienc researchers not submitting papers.
At any rate, Luis von Ahn and his group deserve hearty congratuations. I think this is probably just the first of many important papers from this group.
Peter Lee @ September 12, 2008
[…] Originally posted here: Luis von Ahn, et al. Make the Cover of Science Magazine […]
[…] The award recognizes the pioneering work by Luis von Ahn and his colleagues, which includes reCAPTCHA and gwap.com. (You are all playing on gwap.com, I hope!) Recently, a research article by Luis, Manuel Blum, and several students was the cover article for Science magazine. […]