Today I want to talk about the micro-printer, about my work, how everything started, and what was my motivation behind to build the smallest 3D printer in the world. Let’s start with my daily business. My normal working field is called two photon polymerization. It sounds very nerdy. It is very nerdy.

Well, what do you need for making this stuff? You need a complex laser system, the so called femotsecond laser system, which you focus onto a very tiny spot, very, very, very tiny. This is a very expensive, not very durable laser system. On the other hand, you need a very complex positioning system. We call it Agathe, because it’s very heavy and so Agathe is a nice name. Well, you need this system to move the laser through the sample at a very accurate level at about 200 nanometers, so very accurate.

What can you do with that? Well, you can do things that you cannot see with your eyes. So you can print out whatever you want. You can print out the tower bridge. You can print out Agathe’s husband. But what makes it so mind- blowing? You maybe noticed this scale bar, and it’s 100 microns for the tower bridge and 20 microns for the fat man. For comparison, the diameter of a human here is around 50 microns. So, these objects are like a dust particle or even smaller. You can hardly see it. What you can also do is and what we are also working on is improving the system, improving the resonance, the material we use for catching a worm or something else inside the resin. We move the laser through the resin. If it’s polymerized, we catch up a living animal, here a special worm, and what we are trying to do or what the next step would be to make biocompatible polymers and maybe to write some things inside your body or inside the body of a worm or to attach cells to our structures and so on.

That’s my normal working field. Today I want to tell the story behind the micro-printer, what was my motivation. Everything started at Monday morning, 6:30. Okay, that’s a lie. Maybe it was 10 o’clock. When I went to my laser lab, which is located near Karlsplatz in [inaudible 4:01] House of the Vienna University of Technology, and I went in and saw that this laser system was broken and I tried to fix that. It took me half a day. It took me several hours, and then I noticed, okay, there is a major issue with the pump service. I cannot fix that myself, so we have to call the service technician.

From that point on, I noticed I had time to think. So, I thought what to do now. Maybe start to write my PhD thesis. No, not a good idea at all. So I started thinking maybe write a scientific paper. Not a good idea at all. Then, on Saturday, after a week of thinking, I came up with the idea to build the smallest 3D micro-printer in the world, or the smallest 3D printer in the world.

So, I called my professor and I told him about it. “Let’s build this thing and I have time. Is it okay?” “Go ahead, build it.” So I went to the University, and from that point on, I just put everything out of my brain inside the computer to make this CAD construction of the whole stuff. After a few months, we had the first test run with the system, and it works brilliant from the first test on. It had the same resolution as systems which cost 60,000 Euros, and we only spent 1,500 Euros for the system, not including my salary. But that wouldn’t add so much on it.

How does this work? I’ve brought a video where you can see how you can put in your three dimensional file. This video has been produced by a friend of mine, Junior Veloso. You can see you have a set stage which moves up, and under the set stage, there is a liquid, which gets solidified by the light. Slice by slice you create the model. You really pull it out of the liquid. It just depends on how big is your model. So maybe you have 100 slices, 1,000 or 10,000 slices. So, that’s how it works. Of course, this is a much bigger machine than the micro-printer, but it uses more or less the same principle. So that’s what I want to show you. At the end, this head, this alien head is attached to the building platform. When the process is done, you just simply have to break the head from the support structure you need and then everything’s ready.

What does the micro-printer look like? Well, maybe some of you have already seen this picture. I also brought it to you in person. So I want to kindly introduce you to the 3D micro-printer, which looks like this. It’s very small, so it’s really a desktop version. It’s really an affordable system. We are really proud of it, actually.

You have this tiny little system. There are bigger ones. What can you do with that, with a cheap, affordable system? For example, you all know these hearing aids. They have to be produced individually for each person. So this is a perfect example for using this technology to create the shell for a hearing aid. Normally, you go to the store, they scan your ear, they send the data to Germany via email, and then they print it out with . . . thank you. Then they print it out with a big machine. Then when it’s ready, they send it back to Vienna or wherever you are via post, and then they put in the electronic.

When you have a micro-printer in your store, you can go to the store, they scan your ear, they just press print, the 3D model gets sliced. You can go for coffee, you can go to the University, whatever you want, and instead of five days, you can have your ear shell or your hearing aid in one day, in just one day. That is an example of how these tiny little machines or other cheap 3D printers could change our everyday life.

Thank you very much, and yeah, start printing whatever you want, whatever you need.

The answer comes in the form of Android Honeycomb 3 and it is now the operating system of choice for all the new tablets.

Honeycomb 3 is developed for tablets so it has lots of new technology to take advantage of the power of the CPU and the larger screen of a tablet.

Honeycomb is an extension of the mobile phone Android OS with enhanced multitasking, rich notifications, customizable home screens, widgets, and the list goes on. The interface is a highly interactive 3D experience that creates familiarity while at the same time making it even better.

New applications are being written and old ones are being re-written to take advantage of the powerful graphics, media capabilities and the enhanced user experience that Honeycomb provides.

Honeycomb provides two new bars. They are the “Systems” and “Action” bar. The “systems bar” will always be visible along the bottom of the display. So if you are running an application the system bar will still be visible giving system information and updates (i.e. incoming mail etc)

The “Action bar” presents itself when you are running an application. The “action bar” is contextual and will display information relevant to the application currently running. It’s here that you will also access key information about the running application.

Like all things Android you get the usual five home screens which can give you access to everything in Honeycomb. All home screens have a grid orientation that allow placement for home screen widgets, app shortcuts, and wallpapers using a dedicated visual layout mode to be placed as wanted.

There is now an enhanced version of the Android keyboard. The keys have been reshaped and repositioned for improved typing, and new keys have been added, such as a Tab key, to provide richer and more efficient text input. You can now switch from text/input modes through a special button in the system bar and touching and holding keys will bring up a menu of special characters.

Honeycomb now includes a variety of new connectivity options to greatly enhance the usability of an Android tablet. There is no longer a need to mount a USB hard drive as users can now synchronize there photos and MP3s between a USB connected camera or computer. Users can also connect full keyboards over either USB or Bluetooth.

Included in Honeycomb is a brand new browser. The web experience is now easier to navigate and organize with Honeycomb’s new browser features. Multiple tabs replace browser windows and a new “incognito” mode allows anonymous browsing.

A two-pane email interface makes browsing and organizing emails a much more streamlined experience. Users can select one or more messages and then by using the Action bar they can delete them all or move them to a folder. Users can sync attachments for later viewing and keep track of email using a home screen Widget.

A new camera application has been re-written to take advantage of the extra screen real estate. There is also faster access to exposure, focus, zoom, flash, the front facing camera and a few more extras. With support for time-lapse video Honeycomb gives users a new and creative way to make videos. The Gallery application has also been updated so users can see their photos in full screen mode with easy access to other photos in their collection.

Google Honeycomb now gives the marketplace more vibrancy in regards to the tablet computer but more importantly there is now a choice for consumers. The world is no longer dominated by Apple but instead users now have a choice of technology to buy. Within the Android tablet realm there is even more choice with different sizes and different feature sets among the manufacturers that will appeal to different users. If you want a smaller tablet that is more portable you have that option. If you need something bigger or something more powerful to play games on and be more productive then that is also available.

The author has a blog where he enjoys sharing his passion for the latest gadgets. For a review on one of the latest affordable Android tablets that doesn’t skimp on features check out his review at Acer Iconia Tablet A500.

Video Tanscription

How many of you have had to fill out some sort of web form where you’ve been asked to read a distorted sequence of characters like this? How many of you found it really, really annoying? Okay. Outstanding. So I invented that, or I was one of the people who did it. That thing is called a CAPTCHA, and the reason it’s there is to make sure that you, the entity filling out the form, are actually a human and not some sort of computer program that was written to submit the form millions and millions of times.

The reason it works is because humans, at least non-visually impaired humans, have no trouble reading these distorted squiggly characters, whereas computer programs simply can’t do it as well yet. So for example, in the case of Ticketmaster, the reason you have to type these distorted characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that can buy millions of tickets two at a time.

CAPTCHAs are used all over the Internet, and since they’re used so often, a lot of times the precise sequence of random characters that are shown to the user is not so fortunate. So this is an example from the Yahoo Registration page. The random characters that happened to be shown to the user were W-A-I-T, which of course spells a word. But the best part is the message that the Yahoo Help Desk got about 20 minutes later, this person thought they needed to wait. This of course, is not as bad as this poor person.

Okay. Now, the CAPTCHA project is something that we did here at Carnegie Mellon over 10 years ago, and it’s been used everywhere. Let me now tell you about a project that we did a few years later, which is sort of the next evolution of CAPTCHAs. It’s a project that we call ReCAPTCHA, which is something that we started here at Carnegie Mellon. Then we turned it into a startup company, and then about a year and a half ago, Google actually acquired this company.

So let me tell you how this project started. Okay. So this project started from the following realization. It turns out that approximately 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed everyday by people around the world. When I first heard this, I was quite proud of myself. I thought, look at the impact that my research has had.

But then I started feeling bad. Here’s the thing. Each time you type a CAPTCHA, essentially, you waste 10 seconds of your time. And if you multiply that by 200 million, you get that humanity as a whole is wasting about 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying CAPTCHAs.

So then I started feeling bad, and then I started thinking, well of course we just can’t get rid of CAPTCHAs, because the security of the Web sort of depends on them. But then I started thinking, “Is there any way in which we can use this effort for something that is good for humanity?”

So, see here’s the thing. While you are typing a CAPTCHA, during those 10 seconds, your brain is doing something amazing. Your brain is doing something that computers cannot yet do. So can we get you to do useful work for those 10 seconds?

Another way of putting it is there’s some humongous problem that we cannot yet get computers to solve, but that somehow we can split into tiny 10 second chunks, such that each time somebody solves a CAPTCHA, they solve a little bit of this problem. And the answer to that is yes, and this is what we are doing now.

So what you may not know is that nowadays, while you’re typing a CAPTCHA, not only are you authenticating yourself as a human, but in addition you are actually helping us to digitize books.

Okay. So let me explain how this works. There are a lot of projects out there trying to digitize books. Google has one. The Internet Archive has one. Amazon now, with the Kindle, is trying to digitize books. Basically, the way this works is you start with an old book, like a physical book. You’ve seen those things, right? Like a book.

So you start with a book and then you scan it. Now, scanning a book is like taking a digital photograph of every page of the book. It gives you an image for every page of the book. This is an image with text for every page of the book.

The next step in the process is that the computer needs to be able to decipher all of the words in this image. That’s done using a technology called OCR, for Optical Character Recognition, which takes a picture of text and tries to figure out what text is in there.

Now the problem is that OCR is not perfect. Especially for older books, where the ink has faded and the pages have turned yellow, OCR cannot recognize a lot of the words. For example, for things that were written more than 50 years ago, the computer cannot recognize about 30 percent of the words.

So what we are doing now is we are taking all of the words the computer cannot recognize and we’re getting people to read them for us while they’re typing a CAPTCHA on the Internet. So the next time you type a CAPTCHA, these words that you’re typing are actually words that are coming from books that are being digitized that the computer cannot recognize.

Now, the reason we have two words nowadays instead of one is because, you see, one of the words is a word that the system just got out of a book. It didn’t know what it was, and it’s going to present it to you. But since it doesn’t know the answer for it, it cannot grade it for you. So what we do is we give you another word, one for which the system does know the answer. Okay. We don’t tell you which one’s which, and we say “Please type both.” If you type the correct word for the one for which the system already knows the answer, it assumes you are human, and it also gets some confidence that you typed the other word correctly.

If we repeat this process to like 10 different people, and all of them agree on what the new word is, then we get one more word digitized accurately. So this is how the system works. Basically, since we released it about three of four years ago, a lot of websites have started switching from the old CAPTCHA, where people wasted their time, to the new CAPTCHA, where people are helping to digitize books.

For example, Ticketmaster, every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, you help to digitize a book. Facebook, every time you add a friend or poke somebody, you help to digitize a book. Twitter and about 350,000 other sites are all using ReCAPTCHA. In fact, the number of sites that are using ReCAPTCHA is so high that the number of words that we’re digitizing per day is really, really large. It’s about 100 million a day, which is the equivalent of about 2.5 million books a year, and this is all being done one word at a time by just people typing CAPTCHAs on the Internet.

Of course, since we’re doing so many words per day, funny things can happen. This is especially true because see now we are giving people two randomly chosen English words next to each other. So funny things can happen. So for example, we presented this word. It’s the word “Christians.” There is nothing wrong with it. But if you present it along with another randomly chosen word, bad things can happen. But it’s even worse because the particular website where we show this, actually happened to be called, “The Embassy of the Kingdom of God.” Oops. Here’s another really bad one – JohnEdwards.com. So we keep on insulting people left and right every day.

Now, of course, we’re not just insulting people. See, here’s the thing. Since we’re presenting two randomly chosen words, just interesting things can happen. So this has actually given rise to a really big Internet meme that tens of thousands of people have participated in, which is called CAPTCHA Art. I’m sure some of you have heard about it.

Here’s how it works. Imagine you are using the Internet and you see a CAPTCHA that you think is somewhat peculiar, like this CAPTCHA. Then, what you’re supposed to do is you take a screenshot of it. Then, of course, you fill out the CAPTCHA because you help us digitize a book.

First you take a screenshot, and then you draw something that is related to it. That’s how it works. There are tens of thousands of these. Some of them are very cute. Some of them are funnier, and some of them, like “paleontological shvisle,” they contain Snoop Dog. Okay.

So this is my favorite number of ReCAPTCHA. So this is the favorite thing that I like about this whole project. This is the number of distinct people that have helped us digitize at least one word out of a book through ReCAPTCHA – 750 million, which is a little over 10 percent of the world’s population has helped us digitize human knowledge. It is numbers like these that motivate my research agenda.

So the question that motivates my research is the following. If you look at humanity’s large scale achievements, these really big things that humanity has gotten together and done historically, for example building the pyramids of Egypt, or the Panama Canal, or putting a man on the moon, there is a curious fact about them. It is that they are all done with about the same number of people. It’s weird. They were all done with about 100,000 people. The reason for that is, because before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible. But see, now with the Internet, I’ve just shown you a project where we’ve gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge.

So the question that motivates my research is: If we can put a man on the moon with 100,000, what can we do with 100 million? So, based on this question, we’ve had a lot of different projects that we’ve been working on. Let me tell you about one that I’m most excited about. This is something that we’ve been semi-quietly working on for the last year and a half or so. It hasn’t yet been launched. It’s called Duolingo. Since it hasn’t yet been launched, shush. I can trust you’ll do that.

Okay. So this is a project. Here’s how it started. It started with me posing a question to my graduate student, Severin Hacker. Okay. That’s Severin Hacker. So I posed a question to my graduate student. By the way, you did hear me correctly, his last name is Hacker. So I posed this question to him: How can we get 100 million people translating the Web into every major language for free?

So there are a lot of things to say about this question. First of all, translating the Web. Right now, the Web is partitioned into multiple languages. A large fraction of it is in English. If you don’t know any English, you can’t access it. But there are large fractions in other different languages, and if you don’t know those languages, you can’t access it. So I would like to translate all of the Web, or at least most of the Web, into every major language.

So that’s what I would like to do. Now some of you may say, “Well why can’t we use computers to translate? Why can’t we use machine translations? Machine translation nowadays is starting to translate some sentences here and there. Why can’t we use it to translate the whole Web?”

Well, the problem with that is that it’s not yet good enough, and it probably won’t be for the next 15 to 20 years. It makes a lot of mistakes. Even when it doesn’t make a mistake, since it makes so many mistakes, you don’t know whether to trust it or not.

So let me show you an example of something that was translated with a machine. It actually was a forum post with somebody who was trying to ask a question about JavaScript. It was translated from Japanese into English.

So I’ll just let you read this. ["This is question, English is faulty. Thank computer to translate to help. SORRY!!!!!"] The person starts apologizing from the fact that it’s translated with a computer. The next sentence is going to be the preamble to the question. So he’s just explaining something. Remember, it’s a question about JavaScript. ["At often, the goat-time install a error is vomit."]

Then comes the first part of the question. ["How many time like the wind, a pole, and the dragon?"] Then comes my favorite part of the question. ["This insult to father's stones?"] And then comes the ending, which is my favorite part of the whole thing. ["Please apologize for your stupidity. There are a many thank you."]

Okay. So computer translation is not yet good enough.

So back to the question. We need people to translate the whole Web. Now the next question you might have is, “Why can’t we just pay people to do this?” We could pay professional language translators to translate the whole Web. We could do that. Unfortunately, it would be extremely expensive. For example, translating a tiny, tiny fraction of the whole Web, Wikipedia, into one other language, Spanish. Wikipedia exists in Spanish, but it’s very small compared to the size of English. It’s about 20 percent of the size of English. If we wanted to translate the other 80 percent into Spanish, it would cost at least $50 million, and this is even at the most exploited, outsourcing country out there.

So it would be very expensive. So what we want to do is we want to get 100 million people translating the Web into every major language, for free.

Now, if this is what you want to do, you pretty quickly realize you’re going to run into two pretty big hurdles, two big obstacles. The first one is a lack of bilinguals. So I don’t even know if there exist 100 million people out there using the Web who are bilingual enough to help us translate. That’s a big problem.

The other problem that you’re going to run into is a lack of motivation. How are we going to motivate people to actually translate the Web for free? Normally, you have to pay people to do this. So how are we going to motivate them to do it for free?

Now, when we were starting to think about this, we were blocked by these two things. But then we realized there is actually a way to solve both of these problems with the same solution. There is a way to kill two birds with one stone, and that is to transform language translation into something that millions of people want to do and that also helps with the problem of a lack of bilinguals, and that is language education.

So it turns out that today there are over 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language. People really, really want to learn a foreign language, and it’s not just because they’re being forced to do so in school. For example, in the United States alone, there are over 5 million people who have paid over $500 for software to learn a new language. So people really, really want to learn a new language.

So what we’ve been working on for the last year and a half is a new website. It’s called Duolingo, where the basic idea is people learn a new language for free while simultaneously translating the Web. So basically, they are learning by doing.

So the way this works is whenever you’re just a beginner, we give you very, very simple sentences. There are of course a lot of very simple sentences on the Web. We give you very, very simple sentences along with what each word means. As you translate them and as you see how other people translate them, you start learning the language. As you get more and more advanced, we give you more and more complex sentences to translate. But at all times, you’re learning by doing.

Now the crazy thing about this method is that it actually really works. First of all, people are really, really learning a language. We’re mostly done building it, and now we’re testing it. People really can learn a language with it, and they learn it about as well as the leading language learning software. So people really do learn a language. And not only do they learn it as well, but actually, it’s way more interesting, because you see, with Duolingo, people are actually learning with real content. As opposed to learning with made up sentences, people are learning with real content, which is inherently interesting.

The other thing, so people really do learn a language, but perhaps more surprisingly, the translations that we get from people using the site, even though they are just beginners, the translations that we get are as accurate as those of professional language translators, which is very surprising.

So let me show you one example. This is a sentence that was translated from German into English. The top is the German. The middle is an English translation that was done by somebody who was a professional language translator who we paid $0.20 a word for this translation, and the bottom is a translation by users of Duolingo, none of whom knew any German before they started using the site.

As you can see, it’s pretty much perfect. Now, of course, we play a trick here to make the translations as good as professional language translators. We combine the translations of multiple beginners to get the quality of a single professional translator.

Now even though we’re combining the translations, the site actually can translate pretty fast. So let me show you our estimate of how fast we could translate Wikipedia from English into Spanish. Remember, this is $50 million worth of value. So if we wanted to translate Wikipedia into Spanish, we could do it in 5 weeks with 100,000 active users, and we could do it in about 80 hours with 1 million active users. Since all the projects that my group has worked on so far have gotten millions of users, we are hopeful that we will be able to translate extremely fast with this project.

Now, the thing that I’m most excited about with Duolingo is that I think this provides a fair business model for language education. See here’s the thing. The current business model for language education is the student pays, and in particular the student pays Rosetta Stone $500. That’s the current business model. The problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world’s population doesn’t have $500. So it’s extremely unfair towards the poor. This is totally biased towards the rich.

Now see, in Duolingo, because while you learn you are actually creating value, you are translating stuff, which, for example, we could charge somebody for translations, so this is how we could monetize this. Since people are creating value while they are learning, they don’t have to pay with their money. They pay with their time. But the magical thing here is that they’re paying with their time, but that is time that would have had to be spent anyways learning the language. So the nice thing about Duolingo is I think it provides a fair business model, one that doesn’t discriminate against poor people.

So here’s the site, www.duolingo.com. We haven’t yet launched. But if you go there, you can sign up to be part of our private beta, which we are probably going to start in about three or four weeks. We haven’t yet launched this Duolingo.

By the way, I’m the one talking here, but actually Duolingo is the work of a really awesome team, some of whom are here:

everin Hacker

Antonio Navas

Vicki Cheung

Marcel Ueckermann

Brendan Meeder

Hector Villafuerte

Jose Fuentes

Thank you.

Crowd sourcing has become one of the most significant of these communications, because it allows public interaction and involvement in company projects and decisions. This can be extremely productive for both consumers and the company as products that the general customer wants to see come to life, and companies can feel secure releasing the product as they already know they have a strong consumer basis to work with. Basically, crowd sourcing is a win-win situation.

The way crowd sourcing works depends on what type of crowd sourcing you are working with, as they vary significantly. There are crowd sourcing knowledge based projects such as Wikipedia.org, crowd funding, crowd design projects such as the Linux distribution Ubuntu, crowd sourcing based citizen science projects, and crowd voting where consumers vote on what product they want to see released from the company. Generally they all contain the same concept, the community influences their results and/or products. In all actuality, we see crowd sourcing on a nearly daily basis; from community based distributions to American Idol.

Crowd sourcing remains a generally flexible word, and can encompass anything that requires community interaction. The community will be interested in participating for many reasons such as recognition, rewards, experience, exposure, or just for personal enjoyment. It is not hard to find participants for crowd sourcing, especially if your project is not too specific. The benefits are numerous, ranging from minimal expense, a general idea of the public’s desires, opportunity to achieve unique and creative results, and for exposure of your own company or product line.

Whether you sell a global product, or manage a small time video blogging website, crowd sourcing offers a lot of opportunity to you or your company. In addition to being a win-win project, it also allows a lot more enjoyment of and recognition for your products from the general population. Next time you decide to release a product, or experience a severe creativity block that keeps you from designing your next product, turn to crowd sourcing. If played right, you will find the results beyond satisfying.