The current business model for language education is the student pays — in particular, the student pays Rosetta Stone $500. The problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world’s population doesn’t have $500.

Every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, you help to digitize a book.

Because education is such a broad area, I chose to focus on language learning.

Together with my advisor, Manuel Blum, I co-invented CAPTCHAs, or computer-generated tests that humans are routinely able to pass but that computers have not mastered (they are the squiggly computer letters that are prevalent across the web).

Before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible. But now with the Internet, I've just shown you a project where we've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge.

The question that motivates my research is, if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000 [people], what can we do with 100 million?

People are good at figuring out what's attractive, and computers are good at quickly searching and finding. You put them together, and bang!