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Using games to perform Human Computation
Computers are good at some things, but people still beat them at things like understanding what a picture is about. Here is a great talk by Luis von Ahn about his research and the games he's made to get people to do work when they are playing a game.
This video (about an hour long) is pretty interesting. I remember playing the ESP game when it first came out. It has been a great success and has now led to more interesting games that utilize people brainpower to solve problems that computer are really bad at. Here's a description of the talk:
Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games. For example, the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game -- many people play over 40 hours a week -- and when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it.
I describe other examples of "games with a purpose": Peekaboom, which helps determine the location of objects in images, and Verbosity, which collects common-sense knowledge. I also explain a general approach for constructing games with a purpose.