Luis von Ahn has won the prestigious Lemelson-MIT prize for innovation, for co-founding Duolingo, the freemium platform for learning foreign languages. From Guatemala, he attended Duke University (math degree!) and Carnegie-Mellon University, and is a Consulting Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon (as well as a MacArthur genius award winner). One of the founders of crowdsourcing, his Ph.D.,
completed in 2005, was the first publication to use the term "human computation" that he had coined, referring to methods that combine human brainpower with computers to solve problems that neither could solve alone. Von Ahn's Ph.D. thesis is also the first work on Games With A Purpose, or GWAPs, which are games played by humans that produce useful computation as a side effect.
An example of “human computation” is his invention reCAPTCHA, which not only protects against bots, but also translates unclear text for digitization. (When you do a reCAPTCHA, one line of blurry text is a known word, while the other is an obscure bit of text from an old document, being “crowd-translated” by all those doing that reCAPTCHA.)
While growing up in Guatemala, Luis saw how income kept many from educational opportunities, including learning foreign languages. Hence Duolingo, offering free instruction in 31 languages (from an English platform) and other languages, starting from other “home” languages. With a staff of around 130, and having been used by over 300 million people in six years, it has been amazingly successful.
Here is an NBC story on the award and Luis von Ahn, and a TED talk where Luis von Ahn announced the creation of Duolingo.
Why post this on a political site? Well, it’s a profoundly inspiring story of technology being used to channel the power of large groups of people, without walls and artificial boundaries; it’s an example of an immigrant from Latin America contributing to the USA’s tech world and changing the world for the better; Duolingo, with 130 employees, does a massive show-up of Trump University, an educational sinkhole; Carnegie-Mellon is a tribute to another great immigrant, Andrew Carnegie, responsible for hundreds of free libraries across America; and hey, I’m a big fan of Duolingo and thought lots of you Kossacks would like to know about it, if you don’t already. (I started with Duolingo almost a year ago, and am reviewing French and German, and learning Esperanto, Spanish and Indonesian.)