Luis von Ahn

Luis von Ahn is an computer scientist and tech entrepreneur. His work and research concentrate on a new area of computer science called "Human Computation," which harnesses the combined computational power of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone. Some call this "crowdsourcing." He is founder of the company reCAPTCHA (sold to Google in 2009) which uses a system to distinguish humans from robots and helps digitize world's books at the same time. He's also co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, a popular language-learning platform. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in 2009, a Sloan Fellowship in 2009, a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship in 2007, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2012. von Ahn is a graduate of Duke University, earned his Ph.D from Carnegie Mellon University, and serves as an associate professor in the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.