You probably have been annoyed sometimes by the random distorted characters that websites force you to type so they recognize you as a real person. Maybe, you have also tried to learn a language for fun outside of class using the free language-learning app Duolingo. Then, you might want to know about Luis von Ahn, the founder of the two amazing services.
Born in Guatemala, Luis von Ahn currently a Consulting Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Von Ahn received his PhD in Computer Science at Carneigie Mellon University in 2005 and is a BS in Mathematics alumni from Duke University in 2000. Von Ahn’s interest has been improving the world using human skills in computer technology. For example, Von Ahn’s PhD thesis was the first work on Games With A Purpose, or GWAPs, which are games played by humans that generate useful information as a side effect. He has also been trying to digitalize millions of old books and make them searchable online.
In 2007, Luis von Ahn invented reCAPTCHA, a new form of CAPTCHA which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). ReCAPTCHA was sold to Google in 2009 and the service is known to display several hundreds of million CAPTCHAs every day.
In 2009, von Ahn started Duolingo with his graduate student Severin Hacker. Von Ahn saw in his home country, Guatemala, that learning English was crazily expensive for people, but he believes that “free education will really change the world.” Duolingo was launched for the general public in 2012 and von Ahn has been serving as the CEO since then. The website and app are accessible without charge while offering a premium service for a fee. As of November 2019, Duolingo offers 94 different language courses in 23 languages, and the app has over 300 million registered users globally.
Empire State Building took 7 million human hours to build. “Life is only like 700,000 hours,” von Ahn says. “It’s almost the equivalent of a life. We thought, is there any way we can use this human effort in a way that’s good for humanity?“