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Described as a "real guy to watch" by one of the panel, Luis Von Ahn is one of the people to blame for those little boxes filled with hard-to-read letters that you have to type into a box when you sign up for websites.
The assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University helped develop this Captcha technology back in 2000. It is used to prevent bots setting up large accounts to send spam - and these days around 60 million Captchas are solved by humans around the world every day.
His latest project, reCaptcha, uses the same idea to help decipher words in digitised books that computers find hard to read.
It uses these words as Captcha codes, which are then read by humans - turning the 150,000 hours spent every day solving these little puzzles to positive effect.
Take a walk down memory lane - and find out who made the Agenda Setters poll in years past:
"Blogging's definitely got to the point where there're enough mainstream consumers watching it for the top bloggers to be regarded as agenda setters."
Michael Smith,
Agenda Setters panellist
"Open source gets more important rather than being something that will get squeezed out of the enterprise."
Simon Briskman,
Agenda Setters panellist
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