CAPTCHA Research in Technology Review

Technology Review covered a CAPTCHA paper from computer scientists at UC San Diego that was presented last week at the 2010 USENIX Security Symposium.

The paper: "Re: CAPTCHAs -- Understanding CAPTCHA-Solving from an Economic Context," Marti Motoyama, Kirill Levchenko, Chris Kanich, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, Washington, D.C., August 2010.

The abstract is below. The Technology Review story by Christopher Mims is here.

Reverse Turing tests, or CAPTCHAs, have become an ubiquitous defense used to protect open Web resources from being exploited at scale. An effective CAPTCHA resists existing mechanistic software solving, yet can be solved with high probability by a human being. In response, a robust solving ecosystem has emerged, reselling both automated solving technology and realtime human labor to bypass these protections. Thus, CAPTCHAs can increasingly be understood and evaluated in purely economic terms; the market price of a solution vs the monetizable value of the asset being protected.We examine the market-side of this question in depth, analyzing the behavior and dynamics of CAPTCHA-solving service providers, their price performance, and the underlying labor markets driving this economy.

Surfboard with Onboard Computer / Photos

The full story on the surfboard with an onboard computer is here.
(See even more photos on the Jacobs School Flikr site)

Videos are here.

caption for photo above: (L-R): Dan Ferguson, Trevor Owen, Benjamin Thompson, Julia Tsai, Victor Correa Schneider. Photo credit: UC San Diego

(See even more photos on the Jacobs School Flikr site)


Above caption: Dan Ferguson presses the button that triggers recording of the data captured by the boards sensors. Photo credit: UC San Diego



Above caption: Benjamin Thompson takes the surfboard with onboard computer down to Windansea Beach in La Jolla, California. Photo credit: UC San Diego


Above caption: (L-R): Benjamin Thompson, Julia Tsai, and Trevor Owen with their data-collecting surfboard. Photo credit: UC San Diego


Above caption: (L-R): Benjamin Thompson surfs the data-collecting surfboard. The onboard computer is visible at the front of the board. Photo credit: UC San Diego


Above caption: Victor Correa Schneider prepares to monitor the data sent from the surfboard to land in real-time. Photo credit: UC San Diego



Above caption: (L-R): Structural engineering Ph.D. student Benjamin Thompson preps one of the surfboards he plans to use in upcoming board flexibility tests. Photo credit: UC San Diego


Above caption: Dan Ferguson arrives at Windansea Beach with the data-collecting surfboard with onboard computer in the passenger seat.

(See even more photos on the Jacobs School Flikr site)

Surfboard with Onboard Computer / YouTube VIDEOS

The full story about the surfboard with onboard computer is here. Surfing and surfboard pictures here.

Arturo Flores' Pedestrian Remover on Engadget

Arturo Flores' pedestrian remover caught the attention of the tech blog www.engadget.com. Professor Serge Belongie jokingly wondered if the comments section might resemble some future version of conference peer review.

Check out the full story here on the Jacobs School Web site.

Pedestrian Remover on Discover Blog

"When it almost succeeds, it gives users a good laugh: a post-apocalyptic cityscape including disembodied feet, ownerless dogs, and floating umbrellas."

That's from the write up of the pedestrian remover created by computer science grad student Arturo Flores and computer science professor Serge Belongie here in computer science at UC San Diego.

Dancer Identification and Pedestrian Remover

Computer vision students at UC San Diego who took Serge Belongie's CSE 190-A class set up blogs to show off their final projects during the winter quarter...including a pedestrian remover and a dancer detector. (Dancer detector videos embedded above and below.)

The pedestrian remover project turned into a paper presented at IEEE International Workshop on Mobile Vision. The dancer detector project has cool movies: "Dancer Identification within Shot Boundaries". The final report for the dancer detector is here (PDF). The UC San Diego students who did the dancer detector work are: Kedar Reddy, Nevin Gaudreau and Nishanth Satyanarayana.

Embedded below is another one of the videos from the dancer identification project. Check out more videos, images and information on the dancer identification blog.

It takes a network to raise a graduate student

"As one of our students once put it, 'It takes a network to raise a graduate student,'" said computer science professor Garrison Cottrell.

This is a quote from the Calit2 update story on the UC San Diego Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center.

One of the students photographed for the story is computer science PhD student Jacob Whitehill, of "turn-your-face-into-a-remote-control" fame. See YouTube video below.