![]() Because education is a vast field, Severin Hacker and I (Severin was my PhD student at the time) decided to focus on language education because we knew that learning a language could help people double their income potential. I wanted to work on something that could give everyone equal access to high-quality education. ![]() While most people talk about how education can reduce the wage gap between the rich and the poor, I noticed the opposite was often the case: people with resources can buy an excellent education for their children while the poor barely learn how to read and write, thereby widening the gap. I grew up in Guatemala, a very poor country in which the vast majority of the population doesn’t have access to good education. Tell me a little bit about the genesis of Duolingo? Specifically, how you came up with the idea? How you spotted a need? Tell me a little bit too about your experience of the funding process? Human computation is having humans and computers work together to solve large scale problems that neither can solve alone. After selling 2 companies to Google, I decided to work on something I’ve always deeply cared about: improving education and making it universally accessible. I’m also a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, currently on leave. I sold reCAPTCHA to Google in 2009 - more recently, it’s been used to decode house numbers on Google Maps’ Street View. At its peak, 100 million words were being digitized or around two and a half million books a year. So the way reCAPTCHA worked was that each time you entered a captcha to prove you weren’t a spam bot, you’d simultaneously be digitizing books one word at a time. At that time, computers were being used to scan books to make them digitally readable, but weren’t really good at this, especially with older volumes. Captchas had been reducing internet spam, but I started to feel guilty - humanity was wasting around 500,000 hours per day solving these annoying things. ![]() Google acquired this in 2005 and called it the Google Image Labeler.Ī second project was reCAPTCHA. In this way, thousands of people collectively helped tag pictures with meaningful captions. So I created a game that randomly showed two players an image - they would win if they both used the same words to describe it. For example, I noticed that search engines were bad at indexing images without captions. Can you give me some background on your previous projects?īefore Duolingo, I was working on projects that got humans to help solve problems too complex for computers. In doing my research for this interview I read your impressive profile and discovered that you, along with others, invented CAPTCHA. Luis has been named one of the 10 Most Brilliant Scientists by Popular Science Magazine, 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 FastCompany Magazine.Īmong other accolades, Luis has been honored by President Obama with a Presidential Early Career Award and was selected to personally present Duolingo to the president at the White House’s first Demo Day last August. He is known for inventing CAPTCHAs, receiving a MacArthur “Genius” grant, giving popular TED talks and selling 2 companies to Google in his 20s. Luis von Ahn, Duolin go’s co-founder and CEO, is an entrepreneur and computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. As for who I am, I feel self-conscious in answering this question so I’m just pasting the mini-bio we use for conferences. I believe everyone should have access to high-quality education. Who is Luis von Ahn and what does he believe?
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