Luis von Ahn, assistant Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, starts the talk explaining captcha. This is an example of an application where computer can not solve it very well but humans can. He then goes on to explain other problems where humans can solve things much better than computers can currently. The idea is to harness the “human cycles” and use them to solve computer applications by making a “game” out of it.

Watch the talk at MitWorld.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, talks at MIT about three of Amazon’s web services: Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Jeff answers some interview questions at the end. If you want to skip over the preliminary introductions by the Technology Review, just jump to 6:45 in the video which is when Jeff starts talkings.