Luis von Ahn
Encyclopedia
Luis von Ahn is an entrepreneur and an associate professor in the Computer Science
Department at Carnegie Mellon University
. He is known as one of the pioneers of the idea of crowdsourcing
. He is the founder of the company reCAPTCHA
, which was sold to Google
in 2009. As a professor, his research includes CAPTCHA
s 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.
Siglo Veintiuno
, a leading newspaper in Guatemala, chose him as the person of the year in 2009. In 2011, Foreign Policy Magazine in Spanish named him the most influential intellectual of Latin America and Spain.
and graduated from it in 1996. He received a B.S. in mathematics (summa cum laude) from Duke University
in 2000. He obtained a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005 under the supervision of professor Manuel Blum
, who is well known for advising some of the most prominent researchers in the field of computer science. In 2011, he was awarded the A. Nico Habermann development chair in computer science, which is awarded every three years to a junior faculty member of unusual promise in the School of Computer Science.
. With Nicholas J. Hopper and John Langford
, he was the first to provide rigorous definitions of steganography
and to prove that private-key steganography is possible.
In 2000, he did early pioneering work with Manuel Blum
on CAPTCHAs, computer-generated tests that humans are routinely able to pass but that computers have not yet mastered. These devices are used by web sites to prevent automated programs, or bots, from perpetrating large-scale abuse, such as automatically registering for large numbers of accounts or purchasing huge number of tickets for resale by scalpers. CAPTCHAs brought von Ahn his first widespread fame among the general public due to its coverage in The New York Times
, USA Today
, Discovery Channel
, NOVA scienceNOW
, and other mainstream outlets.
Von Ahn's Ph.D. thesis, completed in 2005, was the first publication to use the term "human computation
" that he had coined for methods that combine human brainpower with computers to solve problems that neither could solve alone. Von Ahn's Ph.D. thesis is also the first work on Games With A Purpose, or GWAPs, which are games played by humans that produce useful computation as a side-effect. The most famous example is the ESP Game
, an online game in which two randomly paired people are simultaneously shown the same picture, with no way to communicate. Each then lists a number of words or phrases that describe the picture within a time limit, and are rewarded with points for a match. This match turns out to be an accurate description of the picture, and can be successfully used in a database for more accurate image search technology. The ESP Game was licensed by Google in the form of the Google Image Labeler
, and is used to improve the accuracy of the Google Image Search
. Von Ahn's games brought him further coverage in the mainstream media. His thesis won the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.
In July 2006, von Ahn gave a tech talk at Google on "Human Computation" (i.e., crowdsourcing) that became viral and was watched by over one million viewers.
In 2007, von Ahn invented reCAPTCHA
, a new form of CAPTCHA
that also helps digitize books. In reCAPTCHA, the images of words displayed to the user come directly from old books that are being digitized; they are words that optical character recognition
could not identify and are sent to people throughout the Web to be identified. ReCAPTCHA is currently in use by over 100,000 web sites and is transcribing over 40 million words per day.
As of 2011, von Ahn is working on Duolingo
, a project that aims to coordinate millions of people to translate the Web into every major language.
Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science
The School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA is a leading private school for computer science established in 1965. It has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs over the decades. U.S...
Department at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
. He is known as one of the pioneers of the idea of crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community through an open call....
. He is the founder of the company reCAPTCHA
ReCAPTCHA
reCAPTCHA is a system originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University's main Pittsburgh campus. It uses CAPTCHA to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas. On September 16, 2009, Google acquired reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is currently...
, which was sold to Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
in 2009. As a professor, his research includes CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA
A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing as an attempt to ensure that the response is generated by a person. The process usually involves one computer asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade...
s and human computation
Human-based computation
Human-based computation is a computer science technique in which a computational process performs its function by outsourcing certain steps to humans...
, 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
David and Lucile Packard Foundation
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is a private foundation that provides grants to not-for-profit organizations. It was created in 1964 by David Packard and his wife Lucile Salter Packard. Following David Packard's death in 1996, the Foundation became the beneficiary of part of his estate...
Fellowship in 2009, a Sloan Fellowship
Sloan Fellowship
The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This is distinct from the Sloan Fellows in business....
in 2009, and a Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
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
Technology Review
Technology Review is a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as "The Technology Review", and was re-launched without the "The" in its name on April 23, 1998 under then publisher R. Bruce Journey...
's TR35
TR35
The TR35 is an annual list published by MIT Technology Review magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35.Some of the most famous winners of the award include Larry Page and Sergey Brin , Linus Torvalds , Jerry Yang , Jonathan Ive , Mark Zuckerberg...
: Young Innovators Under 35, and FastCompany's 100 Most Innovative People in Business.
Siglo Veintiuno
Siglo Veintiuno
Siglo Veintiuno is an important Guatemalan newspaper. It was founded in 1990 by José Rubén Zamora.-External links:*http://www.sigloxxi.com/...
, a leading newspaper in Guatemala, chose him as the person of the year in 2009. In 2011, Foreign Policy Magazine in Spanish named him the most influential intellectual of Latin America and Spain.
Biography
Luis von Ahn grew up in Guatemala City. He attended the American School of GuatemalaAmerican School of Guatemala
American School of Guatemala is one of several prestigious private K-12 college preparatory schools located in Guatemala City, Guatemala.-Mission:...
and graduated from it in 1996. He received a B.S. in mathematics (summa cum laude) from Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
in 2000. He obtained a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005 under the supervision of professor Manuel Blum
Manuel Blum
Manuel Blum is a computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1995 "In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking".-Biography:Blum attended MIT, where he received his bachelor's degree and...
, who is well known for advising some of the most prominent researchers in the field of computer science. In 2011, he was awarded the A. Nico Habermann development chair in computer science, which is awarded every three years to a junior faculty member of unusual promise in the School of Computer Science.
Work
Von Ahn's early research was in the field of cryptographyCryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
. With Nicholas J. Hopper and John Langford
John Langford (computer scientist)
John Langford is a computer scientist, working as a senior researcher at Yahoo! Research. He studied Physics and Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology, earning a double bachelor's degree in 1997, and received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002. Previously, he was...
, he was the first to provide rigorous definitions of steganography
Steganography
Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity...
and to prove that private-key steganography is possible.
In 2000, he did early pioneering work with Manuel Blum
Manuel Blum
Manuel Blum is a computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1995 "In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking".-Biography:Blum attended MIT, where he received his bachelor's degree and...
on CAPTCHAs, computer-generated tests that humans are routinely able to pass but that computers have not yet mastered. These devices are used by web sites to prevent automated programs, or bots, from perpetrating large-scale abuse, such as automatically registering for large numbers of accounts or purchasing huge number of tickets for resale by scalpers. CAPTCHAs brought von Ahn his first widespread fame among the general public due to its coverage in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, USA Today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
, Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel is an American satellite and cable specialty channel , founded by John Hendricks and distributed by Discovery Communications. It is a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav...
, NOVA scienceNOW
NOVA scienceNOW
NOVA scienceNOW is a newsmagazine version of the long running and venerable PBS science program Nova. Premiering on January 25, 2005, the series was originally hosted by Robert Krulwich, who described it as an experiment in coverage of "breaking science, science that's right out of the lab, science...
, and other mainstream outlets.
Von Ahn's Ph.D. thesis, completed in 2005, was the first publication to use the term "human computation
Human-based computation
Human-based computation is a computer science technique in which a computational process performs its function by outsourcing certain steps to humans...
" that he had coined for methods that combine human brainpower with computers to solve problems that neither could solve alone. Von Ahn's Ph.D. thesis is also the first work on Games With A Purpose, or GWAPs, which are games played by humans that produce useful computation as a side-effect. The most famous example is the ESP Game
ESP Game
The ESP Game is an idea in computer science for addressing the problem of creating difficult metadata.The idea behind the game is to use the computational power of humans to perform a task that computers cannot yet do by packaging the task as a game.It was originally conceived by Luis von Ahn of...
, an online game in which two randomly paired people are simultaneously shown the same picture, with no way to communicate. Each then lists a number of words or phrases that describe the picture within a time limit, and are rewarded with points for a match. This match turns out to be an accurate description of the picture, and can be successfully used in a database for more accurate image search technology. The ESP Game was licensed by Google in the form of the Google Image Labeler
Google Image Labeler
Google Image Labeler was a feature, in the form of a game, of Google Image Search that allowed the user to label random images to help improve the quality of Google's image search results...
, and is used to improve the accuracy of the Google Image Search
Google Image Search
Google Images is a search service created by Google that allows users to search the Web for image content. The feature was introduced in July 2001. The keywords for the image search are based on the filename of the image, the link text pointing to the image, and text adjacent to the image. When...
. Von Ahn's games brought him further coverage in the mainstream media. His thesis won the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.
In July 2006, von Ahn gave a tech talk at Google on "Human Computation" (i.e., crowdsourcing) that became viral and was watched by over one million viewers.
In 2007, von Ahn invented reCAPTCHA
ReCAPTCHA
reCAPTCHA is a system originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University's main Pittsburgh campus. It uses CAPTCHA to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas. On September 16, 2009, Google acquired reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is currently...
, a new form of CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA
A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing as an attempt to ensure that the response is generated by a person. The process usually involves one computer asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade...
that also helps digitize books. In reCAPTCHA, the images of words displayed to the user come directly from old books that are being digitized; they are words that optical character recognition
Optical character recognition
Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...
could not identify and are sent to people throughout the Web to be identified. ReCAPTCHA is currently in use by over 100,000 web sites and is transcribing over 40 million words per day.
As of 2011, von Ahn is working on Duolingo
Duolingo
Duolingo is an anticipated website, currently in development, that aims to crowdsource text translation. One intended incentive for the users to take part is that they learn a language. Duolingo is a project of Carnegie Mellon Professor Luis von Ahn and his research team. Duolingo launched in...
, a project that aims to coordinate millions of people to translate the Web into every major language.
Teaching
Von Ahn has used a number of unusual techniques in his teaching, which have won him multiple teaching awards at Carnegie Mellon University. In the fall of 2008, he taught a new course at Carnegie Mellon entitled "Science of the Web".External links
- Luis von Blog, Luis von Ahn's weblog
- Google Tech Talk on human computation by Luis von Ahn
- Google Image Labeler
- John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
- Example of SEO Project given at CMU
- Profile: Luis von Ahn NOVA scienceNOWNOVA scienceNOWNOVA scienceNOW is a newsmagazine version of the long running and venerable PBS science program Nova. Premiering on January 25, 2005, the series was originally hosted by Robert Krulwich, who described it as an experiment in coverage of "breaking science, science that's right out of the lab, science...
aired 2009-06-30