b. 1978
Luis von Ahn is a Guatemalan-American computer scientist and entrepreneur known for pioneering human computation and crowdsourcing. He co-founded CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, and Duolingo, applying computational techniques to language learning and digitization at scale.
Co-invented CAPTCHA to distinguish humans from bots online
Developed reCAPTCHA, digitizing books through human verification tasks
Co-founded Duolingo, a widely-used language learning platform
Pioneered the field of human computation and games with a purpose
MacArthur Fellowship recipient (2006)
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