Luis von Ahn

Luis von Ahn (born August 19, 1978, in Guatemala City) is a Guatemalan-American computer scientist and entrepreneur who pioneered crowdsourcing and human-based computation. With Manuel Blum he developed CAPTCHA beginning in 2000, and he founded reCAPTCHA in 2007, which combined security verification with digitizing books, before Google acquired it in 2009. He co-founded the language-learning platform Duolingo in 2009 with Severin Hacker and serves as its chief executive officer. He earned his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005, where his thesis introduced the concept of human computation and Games With A Purpose, and he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006 and the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 2018.