Luis von Ahn

Luis von Ahn is a U.S.-based computer scientist and entrepreneur, originally from Guatemala. He is the CEO and co-foundercofounder of Duolingo, a language-learning app. He is also the co-inventor of CAPTCHA, founder of reCAPTCHA, andcreator of the ESP Game, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. In 2018, von Ahn also received the $500K Lemelson-MIT Prize for his groundbreaking inventions in global computer technology,. inIn 2020, he was named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and, in 2021, he founded the Luis von Ahn Foundation benefiting Guatemalans. In 2014, he was presented with the Guatemalan government’s highest honor, the Order of the Quetzal.

Luis von Ahn is credited with inventing a new field in computer science that builds systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone, which. heHe calls the field human computation, but others may call it crowdsourcing. Additionally, he holds multiple patents and has been published in many scientific papers. He has been named one of the "10 Most Brilliant Scientists" by Popular SciencePopular Science Magazine, one of the "50 Best Brains in Science" by DiscoverDiscover, one of the "Top Young Innovators Under 35" by MIT Technology ReviewMIT Technology Review, and one of the "100 Most Innovative People in Business" by Fast CompanyFast Company Magazine.

"Luis is the kind of person to invent the future," said Jeannette Wing, who was head of Carnegie Mellon University's department of computer science and now is the executive vice president for research and a professor of computer science at Columbia University. "He's unique in his creativity. His scientific contributions are joyful, spark curiosity, and inspire the young. He has no equal."

Luis von Ahn co-foundedcofounded Duolingo with Severin Hacker in 2011 to make high-quality language education available to everyone. Duolingo is the leading mobile learning platform globally and offers free and subscription access to one hundred courses teaching forty languages, such as Spanish, Japanese, German, Arabic, Hindi, and Korean.

Von Ahn was born and raised in Guatemala, where he experienced a system in which better educational opportunities were limited to the wealthy, and in most cases to those that could speak English. Von Ahn's mother sent him to a private English language school in Guatemala City, which put him at an advantage over the underserved people in the country. This personal advantage later inspired him to help others who were not as fortunate. He set out to create a platform that would bring free and accessible language learning to everyone and help remove obstacles to social mobility across the globe.

With his concept of human computation as a foundation, von Ahn developed the idea of Duolingo by looking into how to leverage human work to translate online content into different languages for free. Luis von Ahn and his graduate student Hacker launched Duolingo as a "100% free, language learning site in which people learn by helping to translate the Web."

Luis von Ahn has expanded Duolingo offerings to include an English certification test. He wanted to help solve the problems people faced trying to get a job in an English-speaking country or an international company. They typically have to pass an English proficiency test, (an exam that usually costs $250) inand addition topay travel costs to the testing center. In his own experience, he had to fly from Guatemala to El Salvador to take his English proficiency test in preparation for applying to college in the U.S. Duolingo’s English certification test can be taken from home for $49 and lasts one hour, in contrast to the $200 to $250 and three hours required for traditional proctored tests. By 2022, over 3500 institutions worldwide — includingworldwide—including Duke, UCLA, Columbia, Dartmouth, New York University, and Yale — acceptedYale—accept Duolingo’s test as part of their admissions process.

Luis von Ahn founded reCAPTCHA in 2006 using the CAPTCHA he had co-createdcocreated with his Ph.D. advisor Manuel Blum at Carnegie Mellon University. A CAPTCHA is a distorted word users are asked to type into a field to verify they are human when logging into a system like an email or another online account. Utilizing CAPTCHA areis effective because computers have a difficult time reading distorted text, but humans can.

reCAPTCHA not only used the distorted word to test the user, but it also put the user to work decoding words computers could not read. The first word in a reCAPTCHA is an automated test generated by the system, but the second usually comes from an old book or newspaper article that a computer scanner is trying (and failing) to digitize. If the person answering the reCAPTCHA gets the first word correct (which the computer knows the answer to), then the system assumes the second word has been translated accurately as well.

In 2009, Google acquired reCAPTCHA for an undisclosed amount. Von Ahn says the sum was somewhere between $10 million and $100 million. Google put the program to work on a large scale, digitizing material for Google Books and the New York TimesNew York Times archives.

Luis von Ahn created the ESP Game in 2005. He began developing the idea for the game in 2004 with a program he built. The program would randomly pair each player with another user on the internet, and show them a series of images. Both players were instructed simply to "type whatever the other guy is typing." The more overlap you produced, the better your score was. So, for example, if a picture of a dog appeared, both users would probably type "dog" along with other words like "animal," "pet," "puppy," or "cute." Von Ahn wanted to create something fun that would use the power of humans to do work as well. In this case, human users would label digital images on the web by playing this game. He estimated that if the game was played as much as other popular online games, most images on the web could be labeled in a few months by the game users. His approach could eliminate much of the need for jobs that do nothing but review and label content and improve the accuracy of image searching online.

Within four months of launch, the ESP Game had about 13,000 users and had created 1.3 million labels for roughly 300,000 images, WiredWired reported in 2007. Von Ahn demoed the game at Google with Sergey Brin and Larry Page taking notice. A few months later, Google licensed it and relaunched it as the Google Image Labeler.

After creating the ESP Game, Luis von Ahn co-created another game with Ruoran Liu and Manuel Blum called Peekaboom, designed to be an entertaining web-based game that could help computers locate objects in images. People would play the game because of its entertainment value, and as a side effect of their playing, the game would collect valuable image metadata, such as which pixels belong to which object in the image. The collected data could be applied towardstoward constructing more accurate computer vision algorithms.

Luis von Ahn also created another game called Phetch with Shiry Ginosar, Mihir Kedia, and Manuel Blum. Phetch was a system for attaching accurate explanatory text captions to arbitrary images on the internet.

In 2008, Luis von Ahn also developed the GWAP website, based on the idea of "games with a purpose.". GWAP.com (no longer active) hosted several games that were designed to get humans to improve computer intelligence, such as the ESP Game. In addition to von Ahn, GWAP and the games were developed by software engineers Mike Crawford and Edison Tan in Carnegie Mellon's computer science department and school of computer science grad students Severin Hacker, Edith Law, and Bryant Lee.

Other games on the site wereincluded the following: Matchin, a game in which players judge which of two images is more appealing, designed to enable image searches to rank images based on which ones look the best; Tag a Tune, in which players describe songs, providing computers a way to search for music other than by title; Verbosity, a test of common sense knowledge, designed to gather facts for use by artificial intelligence programs; and Squigl, a game in which players trace the outlines of objects in photographs, designed to help teach computers to more readily recognize objects.

In 2011, he and Edith Law published a book on the subject titled "Human ComputationHuman Computation". A key factor for von Ahn in human computation is that the human portion should be fun. Humans already spend their idle time playing computer games, so he found a way to harness that game-playing to help computers learn. "We're trading entertainment for labor," he stated.

He was a postdoctoral fellow (2005-2006) at the Center for Algorithm Adaptation Dissemination and Integration (ALADDIN) at Carnegie Mellon University and became an assistant professor in the department of computer science in 2006. During his year as a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon Univerisity, he received offers to teach at Stanford, University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others, but he decided to remain at Carnegie Mellon Univerisity because he liked that it was a world-class institution but still humble and collaborative.

Luis von Ahn is a U.S.-based computer scientist and entrepreneur, originally from Guatemala. He is the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo, a language-learning app. He is also the co-inventor of CAPTCHA, founder of reCAPTCHA and the ESP Game, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. In 2018, von Ahn also received the $500K Lemelson-MIT Prize for his groundbreaking inventions in global computer technology, in 2020, he was named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and, in 2021, he founded the Luis von Ahn Foundation benefiting Guatemalans. In 2014 he was presented with the Guatemalan government’s highest honor, the Order of the Quetzal.

Luis von Ahn is credited with inventing a new field in computer science that builds systems that combine humanshumans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone, which he calls human computation, but others may call crowdsourcing. Additionally, he holds multiple patents and has been published in many scientific papers. He has been named one of the "10 Most Brilliant Scientists" by Popular Science Magazine, one of the "50 Best Brains in Science" by Discover, one of the "Top Young Innovators Under 35" by MIT Technology Review, and one of the "100 Most Innovative People in Business" by Fast Company Magazine.

Luis von Ahn co-founded Duolingo with Severin Hacker in 2011 to make high-quality language education available to everyone. Duolingo is the leading mobile learning platform globally and offers free and subscription access to one hundred courses teaching forty languages, such as Spanish, Japanese, German, Arabic, Hindi, and Korean.

Luis von Ahn took this concept one step further to develop his company reCAPTCHA in 2006.. reCAPTCHA challenged users with two distorted words to decode:

After creating the ESP Game, Luis von Ahn co-created another game with Ruoran Liu and Manuel Blum called Peekaboom, designed to be an entertaining web-based game that cancould help computers locate objects in images. People would play the game because of its entertainment value, and as a side effect of their playing, the game would collect valuable image metadata, such as which pixels belong to which object in the image. The collected data could be applied towards constructing more accurate computer vision algorithms.

inIn 2008, Luis von Ahn also developed the GWAP website, based on the idea of "games with a purpose". GWAP.com (no longer active) hosted several games that were designed to get humans to improve computer intelligence, such as the ESP Game. In addition to von Ahn, GWAP and the games were developed by software engineers Mike Crawford and Edison Tan in Carnegie Mellon's Computercomputer Sciencescience Departmentdepartment and Schoolschool of Computercomputer Sciencescience grad students Severin Hacker, Edith LawEdith Law, and Bryant Lee.

Established in 2021, the Luis von Ahn Foundation is a US-based private foundation benefitting Guatemalans. The Foundation seeks to support local community leaders and nonprofit organizations working on improving the lives of individuals, especially women and girls, in Guatemala. In 2022, the foundation is expected to give $3 million in grants to help Guatemala in three areas: women’s and girls' equality, conservation of the environment, and democracy and youth participation.

Luis von Ahn graduated from secondary school at the American School of Guatemala in 1996. He then earned a bachelor of science in mathematics from Duke University in 2000, where he graduated first in his class of 1,600. He went on to study computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, earning his Ph.D. in 2005.

He was a postdoctoral fellow (2005-2006) at the Center for Algorithm Adaptation Dissemination and Integration (ALADDIN) at Carnegie Mellon University and became an assistant professor in the department of computer science in 2006. During his year as a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon Univerisity, he received offers to teach at StanfordStanford, University of California at BerkeleyUniversity of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts Institute of Technology, among others, but he decided to remain at Carnegie Mellon Univerisity because he liked that it was a world-class institution but still humble and collaborative.

Luis von Ahn is a U.S.-based computer scientist and entrepreneur, originally from Guatemala. He builds systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone, which he calls human computation, but others may call crowdsourcing.

Luis von Ahn is a U.S.-based computer scientist and entrepreneur, originally from Guatemala. He is the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo, a language-learning app. He is also the co-inventor of CAPTCHA, founder of reCAPTCHA and the ESP Game, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. In 2018, von Ahn also received the $500K Lemelson-MIT Prize for his groundbreaking inventions in global computer technology, and, in 2021, he founded the Luis von Ahn Foundation benefiting Guatemalans. In 2014 he was presented with the Guatemalan government’s highest honor, the Order of the Quetzal.

Luis von Ahn is credited with inventing a new field in computer science that builds systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone, which he calls human computation, but others may call crowdsourcing. Additionally, he holds multiple patents and has been published in many scientific papers. He has been named one of the "10 Most Brilliant Scientists" by Popular Science Magazine, one of the "50 Best Brains in Science" by Discover, one of the "Top Young Innovators Under 35" by MIT Technology Review, and one of the "100 Most Innovative People in Business" by Fast Company Magazine.

"Luis is the kind of person to invent the future," said Jeannette Wing, who was head of Carnegie Mellon University's department of computer science and now is the executive vice president for research and a professor of computer science at Columbia University. "He's unique in his creativity. His scientific contributions are joyful, spark curiosity and inspire the young. He has no equal."

Luis von Ahn co-founded Duolingo with Severin Hacker in 2011 to make high-quality language education available to everyone.

Von Ahn was born and raised in Guatemala where he experienced a system in which better educational opportunities were limited to the wealthy, and in most cases to those that could speak EnglishEnglish. Von Ahn's mother sent him to a private English language school in Guatemala CityGuatemala City, which put him at an advantage over the underserved people in the country. This personal advantage later inspired him to help others who were not as fortunate. He set out to create a platform that would bring free and accessible language learning to bring free and accessible language-learning to everyone and help to remove obstacles to social mobility across the globe.

As withWith his previousconcept venturesof reCAPTCHAhuman andcomputation theas ESPa Gamefoundation, von Ahn developed the idea of Duolingo by looking into how to leverage human work to translate online content, but this time to translate it into different languages for free. With that,Luis von Ahn and his graduate student Hacker launched Duolingo as a "100% free language learning site in which people learn by helping to translate the Web."

Luis von Ahn has expanded Duolingo offerings to include an English certification test. He noticedwanted to help solve the many problems people faced trying to get a job in an English-speaking country or an international company. They have to pass an English proficiency test, an exam that usually costs $250 in addition to travel costs to the testing center. In his own experiencesexperience, von Ahnhe had to fly from Guatemala to El SalvadorEl Salvador to take his English proficiency test in preparation for applying to college in the U.S. Duolingo’s English certification test can be taken from home for $49 and lasts 45one minuteshour, in contrast to the $200 to $250 and three hours required for traditional proctored tests. By 20212022, over 30003500 institutions worldwide — including DukeDuke, UCLAUCLA, ColumbiaColumbia, DartmouthDartmouth, New York UniversityNew York University, and YaleYale — accepted Duolingo’s test as part of their admissions process.

Luis von Ahn founded reCAPTCHA in 2006 using the CAPTCHA he had co-created with his Ph.D. advisor Manuel Blum. CAPTCHA is an acronym short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. In 2009, Google acquired reCAPTCHA for an undisclosed amount (von Ahn says the sum was somewhere between $10 million and $100 million) and put the program to work on a tremendous scale, digitizing material for Google Books and the New York Times archives.

When Luis von Ahn wasfounded reCAPTCHA in 2006 studyingusing forthe CAPTCHA he had co-created with his Ph.D., he partnered with his advisor Manuel Blum, at a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor. The two developed an identity verification device known as a CAPTCHA. A CAPTCHACAPTCHA is a distorted word users are asked to type into a field to verify they are human when logging into a system like an email or another online account. CAPTCHA are effective because computers have a difficult time reading distorted text, but humans can.

In 2009, Google acquired reCAPTCHA for an undisclosed amount. Von Ahn says the sum was somewhere between $10 million and $100 million. Google put the program to work on a large scale, digitizing material for Google Books and the New York Times archives.

Luis von Ahn created the ESP Game in 2005. He began developing the idea for the game in 2004 with a program he built. The program would randomly pair each player with another user on the Webinternet, and show them a series of images. Both players were instructed simply to "type whatever the other guy is typing." The more overlap you produced, the better your score was. So, for example, if a picture of a dog appeared, both users would probably type "dog" along with other words like "animal," "pet," "puppy," or "cute." vonVon Ahn wanted to create something fun that would use the power of humans to do work as well. In this case, human users would label digital images on the web by playing this game. He estimated that if the game was played as much as other popular online games, most images on the web could be labeled in a few months by the game users. His approach could eliminate much of the need for jobs that do nothing but review and label content and improve the accuracy of image searching online.

After creating the ESP Game, Luis von Ahn co-created another game with Ruoran Liu and Manuel Blum called Peekaboom, designed to be an entertaining web-based game that can help computers locate objects in images. People would play the game because of its entertainment value, and as a side effect of their playing, wethe game would collect valuable image metadata, such as which pixels belong to which object in the image. The collected data could be applied towards constructing more accurate computer vision algorithms.

Luis von Ahn also created another game called PhetchPhetch with Shiry Ginosar, Mihir Kedia, and Manuel Blum. Phetch was a system for attaching accurate explanatory text captions to arbitrary images on the Webinternet.

Phetch involved multiple participants, encouraging them to write accurate captions to web images. One party would type sentences describing a photo or image he or she is viewing but others cannot see, and the other party would do Webinternet searches to find the image in question. One purpose of the game and its resulting captions was to describe images for visually impaired Internet users.

in 2008, Luis von Ahn also developed the GWAP website, based on the idea of "games with a purpose". GWAP.com, (no longer active,) hosted several games that were designed to get humans to improve computer intelligence, such as the ESP Game. In addition to von Ahn, GWAP and the games were developed by software engineers Mike Crawford and Edison Tan in Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department and School of Computer Science grad students Severin Hacker, Edith Law, and Bryant Lee.

Luis von Ahn is the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo, a language-learning app. He is also the co-inventor of CAPTCHA, founder of reCAPTCHA and the ESP Game, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. In 2018, von Ahn received the $500K Lemelson-MIT Prize for his groundbreaking inventions in global computer technology, and in 2021, he founded the Luis von Ahn Foundation benefiting Guatemalans. In 2014 he was presented Guatemalan government’s highest honor, the Order of the Quetzal.

Luis von Ahn holds multiple patents and has been published in many scientific papers. He has been named one of the "10 Most Brilliant Scientists" by Popular Science MagazinePopular Science Magazine, one of the "50 Best Brains in Science" by DiscoverDiscover, one of the "Top Young Innovators Under 35" by MIT Technology ReviewMIT Technology Review, and one of the "100 Most Innovative People in Business" by Fast Company MagazineFast Company Magazine.

Luis von Ahn co-founded Duolingo with Severin Hacker in 2011 to make high-quality education available to everyone.

The story behind Duolingo's mission - Luis von Ahn, CEO (2017)

Luis von Ahn co-founded Duolingo with Severin Hacker in 2011 to make high-quality education available to everyone. Von Ahn was born and raised in Guatemala where he experienced a system in which better educational opportunities were limited to the wealthy, and in most cases to those that could speak English. Von Ahn's mother sent him to a private English language school in Guatemala City, which put him at an advantage over the underserved people in the country. This personal advantage later inspired him to help others who were not as fortunate. He set out to create a language learning to bring free and accessible language-learning to everyone and help to remove obstacles to social mobility across the globe.

Luis von Ahn is credited with founding the concept of human computation, systems that combine the intelligence of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone.

Using Human Computation and reCAPTCHA to Digitize Old Books, with Luis von Ahn | Big Think (2014)

Luis von Ahn is credited with founding the concept of human computation, systems that combine the intelligence of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone. In 2011, he and Edith Law published a book on the subject titled "Human Computation". A key factor for von Ahn in human computation is that the human portion should be fun. Humans already spend their idle time playing computer games, so he found a way to harness that game-playing to help computers learn. "We're trading entertainment for labor," he stated.

Luis von Ahn is the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo, a language-learning app. He is also the co-inventor of CAPTCHA, founder of reCAPTCHA and the ESP Game, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. In 2018, von Ahn received the $500K Lemelson-MIT Prize for his groundbreaking inventions in global computer technology, and in 2021, he founded the Luis von Ahn Foundation benefiting Guatemalans. Luis von Ahn holds multiple patents and has been published in many scientific papers.

Luis von Ahn holds multiple patents and has been published in many scientific papers. He has been named one of the 10 Most Brilliant Scientists by Popular Science Magazine, one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover, one of the Top Young Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review, and one of the 100 Most Innovative People in Business by Fast Company Magazine.

Established in 2021, the Luis von Ahn Foundation is a US-based private foundation benefitting Guatemalans. The Foundation seeks to support local community leaders and nonprofit organizations working on improving the lives of individuals, especially women and girls, in Guatemala. In 2022, the foundation is expected to give $3 million in grants to help Guatemala in three areas: women’s and girls equality, conservation of the environment, and democracy and youth participation.

Luis von Ahn is the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo, a language-learning app. He is also the co-inventor of CAPTCHA, founder of reCAPTCHA and the ESP Game, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. In 2018, von Ahn received the $500K Lemelson-MIT Prize for his groundbreaking inventions in global computer technology, and in 2021, he founded the Luis von Ahn Foundation benefiting Guatemalans. Luis von Ahn holds multiple patents and has been published in many scientific papers.

Luis von Ahn co-founded Duolingo with Severin Hacker in 2011 to make high-quality education available to everyone. Von Ahn was born and raised in Guatemala where he experienced a system in which better educational opportunities were limited to the wealthy, and in most cases to those that could speak English. Von Ahn's mother sent him to a private English language school in Guatemala City, which put him at an advantage over the underserved people in the country. This personal advantage later inspired him to help others who were not as fortunate. He set out to create a language learning to bring free and accessible language-learning to everyone and help to remove obstacles to social mobility across the globe.

Luis von Ahn expanded Duolingo offerings to include an English certification test. He noticed the many problems people faced trying to get a job in an English-speaking country or an international company. They have to pass an English proficiency test, an exam that usually costs $250 in addition to travel costs to the testing center. In his own experiences, von Ahn had to fly from Guatemala to El Salvador to take his English proficiency test in preparation for applying to college in the U.S. Duolingo’s English certification test can be taken from home for $49 and lasts 45 minutes, in contrast to the $250 and three hours required for traditional proctored tests. By 2021, over 3000 institutions worldwide — including Duke, UCLA, Columbia, Dartmouth, New York University and Yale — accepted Duolingo’s test as part of their admissions process.

Luis von Ahn is credited with founding the concept of human computation, systems that combine the intelligence of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone. In 2011, he and Edith Law published a book on the subject titled "Human Computation". A key factor for von Ahn in human computation is that the human portion should be fun. Humans already spend their idle time playing computer games, so he found a way to harness that game-playing to help computers learn. "We're trading entertainment for labor," he stated.

Luis von Ahn is the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo, a language-learning app. He is also the co-inventor of CAPTCHA, founder of reCAPTCHA and the ESP Game, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. In 2018, von Ahn received the $500K Lemelson-MIT Prize for his groundbreaking inventions in global computer technology, and in 2021, he also founded the Luis von Ahn Foundation benefiting Guatemalans.

"Luis is the kind of person to invent the future," said Jeannette Wing, who was head of Carnegie Mellon University's department of computer science and now is the executive vice president for research and professor of computer science at Columbia University. "He's unique in his creativity. His scientific contributions are joyful, spark curiosity and inspire the young. He has no equal."

Luis von Ahn co-founded Duolingo with Severin Hacker in 2011 to make high-quality education available to everyone. Von Ahn was born and raised in Guatemala where he experienced a system in which better educational opportunities were limited to the wealthy, and in most cases to those that could speak English. Von Ahn's mother sent him to a private English language school in Guatemala City, which put him at an advantage over the underserved people in the country. This personal advantage later inspired him to help others who were not as fortunate.

Luis von Ahn co-founded Duolingo with Severin Hacker in 2011 to make high-quality education available to everyone. As with his previous ventures reCAPTCHA and the ESP Game, von Ahn developed the idea of Duolingo by looking into how to leverage human work to translate online content, but this time to translate it into different languages for free. With that, von Ahn and Hacker launched Duolingo as a "100% free language learning site in which people learn by helping to translate the Web."

Luis von Ahn founded reCAPTCHA in 2006 using the CAPTCHA he had developedco-created with his Ph.D. advisor Manuel Blum. CAPTCHA is an acronym short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. In 2009, Google acquired reCAPTCHA for an undisclosed amount (von Ahn says the sum was somewhere between $10 million and $100 million) and put the program to work on a tremendous scale, digitizing material for Google Books and the New York Times archives.

Luis von Ahn created the ESP Game in 2005. He began developing the idea for the game in 2004 with a program he built. The program would randomly pair each player with another user on the Web, and show them a series of images. Both players were instructed simply to "type whatever the other guy is typing." The more overlap you produced, the better your score was. So, for example, if a picture of a dog appeared, both users would probably type "dog" along with other words like "animal," "pet," "puppy," or "cute." von Ahn wanted to create something fun that would use the power of humans to do work as well. In this case, human users would label digital images on the web by playing this game, human users would label digital images on the web. He estimated in the 2004 paper he co-authored that if the game was played as much as other popular online games, most images on the web could be labeled in a few months by the game users. His approach could eliminate much of the need for jobs that do nothing but review and label content and improve the accuracy of image searching online.

Within four months of launch, the ESP Game had about 13,000 users and had created 1.3 million labels for roughly 300,000 images, Wired reported in 2007. Von Ahn demoed the game at Google with Sergey Brin and Larry Page taking notice. A few months later, Google acquiredlicensed it and relaunched it as the Google Image Labeler.

After creating the ESP Game, Luis von Ahn co-created another game with Ruoran Liu and Manuel Blum called Peekaboom, designed to be an entertaining web-based game that can help computers locate objects in images. People play the game because of its entertainment value, and as a side effect of their playing, we collect valuable image metadata, such as which pixels belong to which object in the image. The collected data could be applied towards constructing more accurate computer vision algorithms.

Luis von Ahn also created another game called Phetch with Shiry Ginosar, Mihir Kedia, and Manuel Blum. Phetch wasawas a system for attaching accurate explanatory text captions to arbitrary images on the Web. Phetch is an engaging multiplayer game that entices people to write accurate captions.

Phetch involved multiple participants, encouraging them to write accurate captions to web images. One party would type sentences describing a photo or image he or she is viewing but others cannot see, and the other party would do Web searches to find the image in question. One purpose of the game and its resulting captions was to describe images for visually impaired Internet users.

in 2008, Luis von Ahn also developed the GWAP website, based on the idea of "games with a purpose". GWAP.com, no longer active, hosted several games that were designed to get humans to improve computer inteligenceintelligence, such as the ESP Game. Other In addition to von Ahn, GWAP and the games on the site were: Matchin, a game in which players judge which of two images is more appealing, designed to enable image searches to rank images based ondeveloped whichby onessoftware lookengineers theMike best;Crawford Tagand aEdison Tune,Tan in whichCarnegie playersMellon's describeComputer songs,Science providingDepartment computersand aSchool wayof toComputer searchScience forgrad music other than bystudents title;Severin VerbosityHacker, a test of common senseEdith knowledgeLaw, designed to gather facts for use by artificial intelligence programs; and Squigl, a game in which players trace the outlines of objects in photographs, designed to helpBryant teach computers to more readily recognize objectsLee.

Other games on the site were: Matchin, a game in which players judge which of two images is more appealing, designed to enable image searches to rank images based on which ones look the best; Tag a Tune, in which players describe songs, providing computers a way to search for music other than by title; Verbosity, a test of common sense knowledge, designed to gather facts for use by artificial intelligence programs; and Squigl, a game in which players trace the outlines of objects in photographs, designed to help teach computers to more readily recognize objects.

Luis von Ahn is credited with founding the concept of human computation, systems that combine the intelligence of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone. In 2011, he and Edith Law published a book on the subject titled "Human Computation". A key factor for von Ahn in human computation is that the human portion should be fun. Humans already spend their idle time playing computer games, so he found a way to harness that game-playing to help computers learn. "We're trading entertainment for labor," he stated.

Luis von Ahn graduated from secondary school at the American School of Guatemala in 1996. He then earned a bachelor of science in mathematics from Duke University in 2000, where he graduated first in his class of 1,600. He went on to study computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, earning his Ph.D. in 2005. He was a postdoctoral fellow (2005-2006) at the Center for Algorithm Adaptation Dissemination and Integration (ALADDIN) at Carnegie Mellon University and became an assistant professor in the department of computer science in 2006.

He was a postdoctoral fellow (2005-2006) at the Center for Algorithm Adaptation Dissemination and Integration (ALADDIN) at Carnegie Mellon University and became an assistant professor in the department of computer science in 2006. During his year as a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon Univerisity, he received offers to teach at Stanford, University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others, but he decided to remain at Carnegie Mellon Univerisity because he liked that it was a world-class institution but still humble and collaborative.

Luis von Ahn also created another game called Phetch with Shiry Ginosar, Mihir Kedia, and Manuel Blum. Phetch wasa system for attaching accurate explanatory text captions to arbitrary images on the Web. Phetch is an engaging multiplayer game that entices people to write accurate captions.

Luis von Ahn also developed the GWAP website, based on the idea of "games with a purpose". GWAP.com, no longer active, hosted several games that were designed to get humans to improve computer inteligence, such as the ESP Game. Other games on the site were: Matchin, a game in which players judge which of two images is more appealing, designed to enable image searches to rank images based on which ones look the best; Tag a Tune, in which players describe songs, providing computers a way to search for music other than by title; Verbosity, a test of common sense knowledge, designed to gather facts for use by artificial intelligence programs; and Squigl, a game in which players trace the outlines of objects in photographs, designed to help teach computers to more readily recognize objects.