Luis von Ahn

Luis von Ahn Biography
Dr. Luis von Ahn (born in 1979 in Guatemala City, Guatemala) is a businessman and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science known as one of the pioneering idea of ​​crowdsourcing at Carnegie Mellon University.He. He is the founder of the company reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009. As a professor, his research includes captchas and human calculations, and has gained international recognition and many praiseworthy. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (also known as the "genius grant") in 2006, David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in 2009, the Sloan Fellowship in 2009, and the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship in 2007. He also has been called one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover magazine, and has made it to the list of recognized many magazines including Popular Science Brilliant, 10 Silicon.com 's 50 most influential people of Technology, TR35 Technology Assess this: In the young Updates under 35, and 100 of the Most Innovative FastCompany people in the business.


Siglo Veintiuno, a major newspaper in Guatemala, chose him as the person years in 2009. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine in Spanish named him the most influential intellectuals of Latin America and Spain.



Biography

Von Ahn grew up in Guatemala City. He has attended the American School of Guatemala and graduated in 1996. He received a B.S. in mathematics (summa cum laude) from Duke University in 2000. He earned a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005 under seliaan professor Manuel Blum, who is famous for advising some of the most prominent researchers in the field of computer science. In 2011, he was awarded the A. Nico Habermann seats in the development of computer science, which is given every three years to junior faculty members of exceptional promise in the Center for Computer Science.


Work

Von Ahn early research was in the field of cryptography. By Nicholas J. Hopper and John Langford, he was the first to give a rigorous definition of steganography and to prove that private primary steganography is available.


In 2000, he did pioneering work beginning with the captchas Manuel Blum, computer-generated test that humans are routinely able to pass but that the computer was no longer used by the site mastered.These device to prevent automatic programs, or bots, from perpetrating large-scale abuse, such as automatically signing up for an account number or a purchase of a large number of tickets for resale by the Scalpers. Von Ahn captchas brought the first widespread fame among the general public because the coverage in The New York Times, USA Today, Discovery Channel, NOVA ScienceNOW, and other mainstream branch.
Von Ahn, Ph.D. thesis, prepared in 2005, is the first publication to use the term "human computation" that he had suggested to the method that combines the power of the human mind with computers to solve problems that can not complete the course. Von Ahn, Ph.D. This thesis first work to the Games with a purpose, or GWAPs, which is a game played by humans who produce useful computation as a side effect. The most famous example is the ESP game, online game where two people are paired at random simultaneously show the same image, with no way to communicate. Each then lists some word or phrase that describes the image within the time limit, and rewarded with an eye for the game. This game turned out to be an appropriate caption, and can be successfully used in the database for a more precise image search technology. ESP game licensed by Google in Google Image Labeler, and used to improve the accuracy of Google Image Search. [1 Von Ahn took the game in the mainstream media coverage of the inaugural. His thesis won the Best Doctoral Dissertation of the Center for the Study of Philosophy in Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University.


In July 2006, von Ahn gave a talk at Google about tech "Human Computation" (ie, crowdsourcing) to be a virus and has been seen by more than one million viewers.


In 2007, von Ahn created reCAPTCHA, a new form of CAPTCHA that also helps digitize books. The reCAPTCHA, image is displayed to the user's words that come directly from old books that have been digitized, they are words that optical character recognition can not be identified and sent to people all over the web are identified. ReCAPTCHA is now used by more than 100,000 websites and is being copied over 40 million words every day.
So that in 2011, von Ahn works in Duolingo, a project which aims to coordinate the millions of people to translate Web into every major language