Keynote: “Duolingo: Learn a Language for Free ?while Helping to Translate the Web”, Luis Von Ahn, Associate Professor in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Luis von Ahn (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/) is an entrepreneur and an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is known as the pioneer of the idea of “Human Computation”, sometimes called crowdsourcing. His latest project is DuoLingo, which allows people to learn foreign languages online for free, while contributing to translate the Web.

He is also the founder of the company reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009. As a professor, his research includes CAPTCHAs and human computation, and has earned him international recognition and numerous honors. 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, and a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship in 2007. He has also been named one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover Magazine, and has made it to many recognition lists that include Popular Science Magazine’s Brilliant 10, Silicon.com’s 50 Most Influential People in Technology, Technology Review’s TR35: Young Innovators Under 35, and FastCompany’s 100 Most Innovative People in Business.