When Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn first proposed the idea of "games with a purpose" (GWAPs) in 2004, his goal was to harness human brainpower so that computers could learn from it. His idea was simple: Get humans to solve tasks that are trivial to us but difficult for computers back then, like labeling images, transcribing text or classifying data.
Players in the retail world are well aware of how competitive the industry can be - particularly when it comes to earning, and maintaining the attention of your most valuable audiences. Social media has emerged as one of the best ways to interact with, and engage an increasingly collaborative audience. And with more than 1bn monthly active users, Facebook is becoming more alluring than ever to marketers.
More recently, reporters have requested user-exported data from TikTok and OpenAI to answer key questions about how tech users interact and what they're shown. User-exported data contains detailed and well-formatted data based on each user's history, and is likely an artifact of compliance to data privacy laws in Europe and California. Importantly, this data allows reporters to report on real behavior on tech platforms, as opposed to creating fictitious accounts and mimicking user behavior.
Dr. Lora Aroyo, Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, argues that this assumption no longer holds up. Her research at the intersection of data-centric AI and pluralistic alignment challenges the binary worldview that underpins most AI systems. Instead of seeking a single "gold standard" answer, she advocates for embracing disagreement, diversity, and pluralism as the foundation of more reliable, culturally aware AI.
The agency is once again calling on citizen innovators to help design the future, this time through a new HeroX challenge to develop better wheels and more robust tires for lunar rovers. The competition, called the Rock and Roll with NASA Challenge, offers $155,000 in prizes for top designs that can handle the punishing surface of the moon. As with previous NASA and HeroX challenges, everyone from amateur inventors working out of their garages to teams of students or professional companies are welcome to participate.
So, picture a moment when a new source of information comes online, turns into a go-to for people everywhere, sometimes to the chagrin of professors and bosses, but becomes a household name and really changes the internet. So we're doing AI again. Actually I am talking about Wikipedia, the online crowdsourced encyclopedia, which for a long time generated a lot of skepticism, but today is actually seen as a pretty trusted source of information. It's an example of an organization that actually created something positive on the internet.
