Luis from Ahn

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Luis from Ahn

Luis von Ahn (* 1979 in Guatemala City ) is a Guatemalan professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania, USA.

He was best known as one of the founders of crowdsourcing , through the invention of the CAPTCHA and the founding of the company reCAPTCHA, which was later sold to Google .

life and work

Ahn's parents were both doctors, and his family owned a confectionery factory. He grew up in Guatemala City, where he attended the American school. After a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Duke University in 2000, he received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005 with the computer scientist Manuel Blum .

After initially dealing with cryptography , von Ahn coined the term human computation in his dissertation to describe methods that are supposed to solve problems by combining human cognitive abilities and computer technology, which neither man nor machine would be capable of alone. He is still interested in this field of research today, especially in the form of so-called GWAPs (games with a purpose), i.e. games that solve problems using human computation . In von Ahn's first game of this kind, the so-called Extra Sensory Perception Game , the players have to name parts of images as quickly as possible. The data obtained through this game may be used. a. used in Google image search.

For his research in the areas of CAPTCHA, human-based computation games ( Game with a purpose ) and human-based information processing, Ahn u. a. honored with the MacArthur Fellowship and the Grace Murray Hopper Award . In 2018 he received the Lemelson MIT Prize .

Since 2011, von Ahn has been working on the Duolingo project , an online service for learning languages.

Web links

Commons : Luis von Ahn  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ Luis von Ahn's page at Carnegie Mellon University
  2. ↑ Google buys Luis from Ahn's company ReCAPTCHA
  3. ↑ About Google Image Labeler
  4. ^ Meet Duolingo, Google's Next Acquisition Target; Learn A Language, Help The Web at techcrunch.com, accessed June 20, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Ahn, Luis von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Guatemalan computer scientist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH 1979
PLACE OF BIRTH Guatemala City , Guatemala