Luis von Ahn. Telling people you're an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University at 26 sounds pretty impressive. For Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn, it's just a bullet point on his long resume.
When he was 12 years old, Luis von Ahn had a brilliant idea for free gyms. Exercisers generate energy that is wasted, and if there were machines that could convert that energy into electricity, gym fees could be eliminated. Although this idea never came to fruition, the two companies Captcha and ReCAPTCHA not only did it happen, but they also became famous in the online community.
In 2000, web-based email, while hugely successful, had a huge problem: spammers were bombarding users with automatically created accounts, and as soon as one account was closed, a new one was created. A way to distinguish humans from automated visitors was urgently needed.
Luis von Ahn, then 22, just weeks after graduating from school, came up with a solution. Together with his supervisor Manuel Blum, von Ahn presented the “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” or simply Captcha.
In 2007, the transition from Captcha to ReCAPTCHA, an advanced test that you all know, came. ReCAPTCHA, in addition to separating bots from humans, could also help in the digitization of books.
In 2008, when the New York Times asked Luis to digitize their massive archive (27 years of articles took 10 years to digitize), he took on reCAPTCHA and digitized 129 years of articles in less than 24 months.
Von Ahn's two companies have made him the most sought-after computer scientist in the world. Bill Gates himself called Luis to hire him at Microsoft, and he politely declined.
He is currently creating a new revolution through Duolingo, a language learning app that has delivered billions of lessons to more than 120 million users worldwide.
And this time, Luis is one step ahead. Duolingo helps educate the world for free by translating the entire web, using progressively smarter teaching apps through machine learning.
TNW information.
