Luis Von Ahn is an entrepreneur and an associate professor at the Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University. He has a clear professional objective: to build systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone. He calls this “Human Computation”.
Born in Guatemala City in 1979, Von Ahn has developed some very interesting experiments with artificial intelligence and human computation. He was the founder of ReCAPTCHA, a company which designed a tool that asks for typed input to prove that the user of a software or website is a human and not a computer. He was also the creator of ESP and Gwap, two game-like tools that use human computational power to perform tasks that computers are not good at (originally, image recognition).
Von Ahn’s latest project, Duolingo, was launched in June 2012 and uses crowdsourcing to achieve an ambitious goal. The idea is exciting: “How can you translate the entire internet and do it for free?” Duolingo will be a revolutionary product on which millions of internet users from around the world will work together to translate the internet and learn a new language at the same time. All for free, as he explains in a TEDx video called “The Next Chapter in Human Computation”.
The idea is simple: “we need people to translate the whole Web. We could pay professional language translators to translate the whole Web. Unfortunately, it would be extremely expensive. But there are over 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language. In Duolingo, the basic idea is people learn a new language for free while simultaneously translating the Web. And so basically they’re learning by doing.”
Currently, the project’s site offers Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian courses for English speakers, as well as English for Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian speakers.
In a Google Tech Talk, Von Anh explains human computation in detail and tells why the subject is so fascinating to him. When seeing him speak, one understands why he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a., the “genius grant”) in 2006, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in 2009, a Sloan Fellowship in 2009, a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship in 2007, and was named the most influential intellectual of Latin America and Spain in 2011 by the Foreign Policy Magazine in Spanish.
For more information about Von Ahn, read this article by Wired: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15-07/ff_humancomp, access his twitter (https://twitter.com/LuisvonAhn), or wait for his WWW 2013 lecture.
