Luis von Ahn

Luis von Ahn is a U.S.-based computer scientist and entrepreneur, originally from Guatemala. He is the CEO and cofounder of Duolingo, a language-learning app. He is also the co-inventor of CAPTCHA, founder of reCAPTCHA, creator of the ESP Game, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. In 2018, von Ahn also received the $500K Lemelson-MIT Prize for his groundbreaking inventions in global computer technology. In 2020, he was named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and, in 2021, he founded the Luis von Ahn Foundation benefiting Guatemalans. In 2014, he was presented with the Guatemalan government’s highest honor, the Order of the Quetzal.

Luis von Ahn is credited with inventing a new field in computer science that builds systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone. He calls the field human computation, but others call it crowdsourcing. Additionally, he holds multiple patents and has been published in many scientific papers. He has been named one of the "10 Most Brilliant Scientists" by Popular Science, one of the "50 Best Brains in Science" by Discover, one of the "Top Young Innovators Under 35" by MIT Technology Review, and one of the "100 Most Innovative People in Business" by Fast Company.

"Luis is the kind of person to invent the future," said Jeannette Wing, who was head of Carnegie Mellon University's department of computer science and now is the executive vice president for research and a professor of computer science at Columbia University. "He's unique in his creativity. His scientific contributions are joyful, spark curiosity, and inspire the young. He has no equal."

Luis von Ahn cofounded Duolingo with Severin Hacker in 2011 to make high-quality language education available to everyone. Duolingo is the leading mobile learning platform globally and offers free and subscription access to one hundred courses teaching forty languages, such as Spanish, Japanese, German, Arabic, Hindi, and Korean.

The story behind Duolingo's mission - Luis von Ahn, CEO (2017)

Von Ahn was born and raised in Guatemala, where he experienced a system in which better educational opportunities were limited to the wealthy, and in most cases to those that could speak English. Von Ahn's mother sent him to a private English language school in Guatemala City, which put him at an advantage over the underserved people in the country. This personal advantage later inspired him to help others who were not as fortunate. He set out to create a platform that would bring free and accessible language learning to everyone and help remove obstacles to social mobility across the globe.

With his concept of human computation as a foundation, von Ahn developed the idea of Duolingo by looking into how to leverage human work to translate online content into different languages for free. Luis von Ahn and his graduate student Hacker launched Duolingo as a "100% free, language learning site in which people learn by helping to translate the Web."

Luis von Ahn has expanded Duolingo offerings to include an English certification test. He wanted to help solve the problems people faced trying to get a job in an English-speaking country or an international company. They typically have to pass an English proficiency test (an exam that usually costs $250) and pay travel costs to the testing center. In his own experience, he had to fly from Guatemala to El Salvador to take his English proficiency test in preparation for applying to college in the U.S. Duolingo’s English certification test can be taken from home for $49 and lasts one hour, in contrast to the $200 to $250 and three hours required for traditional proctored tests. By 2022, over 3500 institutions worldwide—including Duke, UCLA, Columbia, Dartmouth, New York University, and Yale—accept Duolingo’s test as part of their admissions process.

Luis von Ahn founded reCAPTCHA in 2006 using the CAPTCHA he cocreated with his Ph.D. advisor Manuel Blum at Carnegie Mellon University. A CAPTCHA is a distorted word users are asked to type into a field to verify they are human when logging into a system like an email or another online account. Utilizing CAPTCHA is effective because computers have a difficult time reading distorted text, but humans can.

Luis von Ahn took this concept one step further to develop his company reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA challenged users with two distorted words to decode:

Screenshot from reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA not only used the distorted word to test the user but also put the user to work decoding words computers could not read. The first word in a reCAPTCHA is an automated test generated by the system, but the second usually comes from an old book or newspaper article that a computer scanner is trying (and failing) to digitize. If the person answering the reCAPTCHA gets the first word correct (which the computer knows the answer to), then the system assumes the second word has been translated accurately as well.

In 2009, Google acquired reCAPTCHA for an undisclosed amount. Von Ahn says the sum was somewhere between $10 million and $100 million. Google put the program to work on a large scale, digitizing material for Google Books and the New York Times archives.

Luis von Ahn created the ESP Game in 2005. He began developing the idea for the game in 2004 with a program he built. The program would randomly pair each player with another user on the internet and show them a series of images. Both players were instructed simply to "type whatever the other guy is typing." The more overlap you produced, the better your score was. So, for example, if a picture of a dog appeared, both users would probably type "dog" along with other words like "animal," "pet," "puppy," or "cute." Von Ahn wanted to create something fun that would use the power of humans to do work as well. In this case, human users would label digital images on the web by playing this game. He estimated that if the game was played as much as other popular online games, most images on the web could be labeled in a few months by the game users. His approach could eliminate much of the need for jobs that do nothing but review and label content and improve the accuracy of image searching online.

Within four months of launch, the ESP Game had about 13,000 users and had created 1.3 million labels for roughly 300,000 images, Wired reported in 2007. Von Ahn demoed the game at Google with Sergey Brin and Larry Page taking notice. A few months later, Google licensed it and relaunched it as the Google Image Labeler.

After creating the ESP Game, Luis von Ahn co-created another game with Ruoran Liu and Manuel Blum called Peekaboom, designed to be an entertaining web-based game that could help computers locate objects in images. People would play the game because of its entertainment value, and as a side effect of their playing, the game would collect valuable image metadata, such as which pixels belong to which object in the image. The collected data could be applied toward constructing more accurate computer vision algorithms.

Luis von Ahn also created another game called Phetch with Shiry Ginosar, Mihir Kedia, and Manuel Blum. Phetch was a system for attaching accurate explanatory text captions to arbitrary images on the internet.

Phetch involved multiple participants, encouraging them to write accurate captions to web images. One party would type sentences describing a photo or image he or she is viewing but others cannot see, and the other party would do internet searches to find the image in question. One purpose of the game and its resulting captions was to describe images for visually impaired Internet users.

In 2008, Luis von Ahn also developed the GWAP website, based on the idea of "games with a purpose." GWAP.com (no longer active) hosted several games that were designed to get humans to improve computer intelligence, such as the ESP Game. In addition to von Ahn, GWAP and the games were developed by software engineers Mike Crawford and Edison Tan in Carnegie Mellon's computer science department and school of computer science grad students Severin Hacker, Edith Law, and Bryant Lee.

Other games on the site included the following: Matchin, a game in which players judge which of two images is more appealing, designed to enable image searches to rank images based on which ones look the best; Tag a Tune, in which players describe songs, providing computers a way to search for music other than by title; Verbosity, a test of common sense knowledge, designed to gather facts for use by artificial intelligence programs; and Squigl, a game in which players trace the outlines of objects in photographs, designed to help teach computers to more readily recognize objects.

ALDEA received a $25,000 grant from the Luis von Ahn Foundation

Established in 2021, the Luis von Ahn Foundation is a US-based private foundation benefitting Guatemalans. The Foundation seeks to support local community leaders and nonprofit organizations working on improving the lives of individuals, especially women and girls, in Guatemala. In 2022, the foundation is expected to give $3 million in grants to help Guatemala in three areas: women’s and girls' equality, conservation of the environment, and democracy and youth participation.

Luis von Ahn is credited with founding the concept of human computation, systems that combine the intelligence of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone.

Using Human Computation and reCAPTCHA to Digitize Old Books, with Luis von Ahn | Big Think (2014)

In 2011, he and Edith Law published a book on the subject titled Human Computation. A key factor for von Ahn in human computation is that the human portion should be fun. Humans already spend their idle time playing computer games, so he found a way to harness that game-playing to help computers learn. "We're trading entertainment for labor," he stated.

Luis von Ahn graduated from secondary school at the American School of Guatemala in 1996. He then earned a bachelor of science in mathematics from Duke University in 2000, where he graduated first in his class of 1,600. He went on to study computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, earning his Ph.D. in 2005.

He was a postdoctoral fellow (2005-2006) at the Center for Algorithm Adaptation Dissemination and Integration (ALADDIN) at Carnegie Mellon University and became an assistant professor in the department of computer science in 2006. During his year as a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon Univerisity, he received offers to teach at Stanford, University of California at Berkeley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others, but he decided to remain at Carnegie Mellon Univerisity because he liked that it was a world-class institution but still humble and collaborative.