Dr. Luis von Ahn was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala in 1978 to parents who were both physicians. His interest in science and computers was nurtured by his parents as a child when his mother bought him his first computer at the age of 8. Von Ahn was sent to the American School of Guatemala in Guatemala City by his mother, which gave him additional opportunities to pursue his education in the United States. He obtained his BS (2000) summa cum laude in Mathematics from Duke University, and his PhD (2005) in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Under the supervision of his mentor Manuel Blum, they coined the term “CAPTCHA” (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) to distinguish human users from bots.
Following his appointment as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon in 2005, von Ahn continued his work in computer science. Most notably, he also coined “reCAPTCHA” to further improve cyber security and is most identifiable to readers as the photo tiles to verify one is not a robot. He went on to sell this service to Google in 2009. In 2011, he co-founded Duolingo with his graduate student Severin Hacker, which is now one of the most popular language learning apps in the world. Von Ahn now serves as the CEO of Duolingo and continues to advocate for education equity and accessibility across the world. Von Ahn was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2023 for his patent of reCAPTCHA and holds 13 U.S. patents. He was a MacArthur Fellow (2006), won the Lemelson-MIT prize (2018), and honored with a Great Immigrants Award (2021) by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
References:
- https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/luis-von-ahn
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ-k92JT_OI&ab_channel=SouthParkCommons
- https://www.nafsa.org/ie-magazine/2024/5/2/luis-von-ahn-power-language
- https://www.invent.org/inductees/luis-von-ahn
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