The 3rd day at WWW2013 continued with the opening ceremony and speech from Luis von Ahn. The activity also invited the presence of local authorities, like the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Marco Antônio Raupp, the executive director of Rio Negócios, Marcelo Haddad, representing the mayor’s office of Rio de Janeiro, and representatives of the WWW. In the ceremony, there was a panorama of academic production being presented at the Conference that demonstrated that the countries which submitted the most papers to the judges commission were, The United States, China, Germany, the UK, India and Brazil.
In the sequence, keynote speaker Luis Von Ahn captivated the audience with his presentation focused on his projects reCaptcha and Duolingo. Recognizing inequality in the education system, Duolingo was inspired by the demand for affordable, accessible language education. “Over 1.2 billion people want to learn a language… not because they want to travel, but because they want to be able to get better jobs and better their lives.” Because you need money in order to learn a language (classes or buy a language program), Von Ahn is providing a bridge for this gap with Duolingo by making students learning power profitable through translation of web content.
While Von Ahn is not a linguist or a language expert, he is an expert in productivity. Unconcerned with theories and teaching methods, he uses big data from his user base to improve language education methods by testing new methods on samples from his millions of users and comparing them with other methods. Vohn Ahn offered also advice to entrepreneurs about building successful businesses on the web. His strategy is to always ensure that his services on Duolingo are free, “I’m never going to charge the users” he warned his investors before shaking hands and closing the deal.
More highlights of the day:
- Data Visualization
Fernanda Viegas, from Google, showed projects
Map of Youtube Trends and Wind Map, which make a visualization of data of wind patterns in a precise and artistic form.
- eGov and Open Data
Pierre Andrews presented his project on Parliamentary Transparency, Cidadão Automático. Rodrigo Bandeira presented his Cidade Democrática project, and discusses ways to make people engage with their governments. And Vagner Diniz from w3c brazil talked about open data for development (read more: http://www.od4d
- Entrepreneurship
The Cachaça Map exhibited their web project of production of content about the production of alcohol in Brazil. (learn more about the project from this post.
Remember, the papers from the presenters at the conference are compiled here: /papers/ and you can check the best moments on the social network channels on Storify: http://storify.com/gabiagustini/www2013-conference-3rd-day
