Luis von Ahn
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| Luis von Ahn | |
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| Born | 1979 Guatemala City, Guatemala |
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| Residence | United States |
| Institutions | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Alma mater | Carnegie Mellon University Duke University |
| Doctoral advisor | Manuel Blum |
| Notable awards | MacArthur Fellowship |
Luis von Ahn (born in 1979 in Guatemala City, Guatemala) is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research includes CAPTCHAs and human computation, and has earned him international recognition and numerous honors. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a., the "genius award") in 2006[1][2] and is the recipient of a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship. He has also been named one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover Magazine, and has made it to numerous recognition lists that include Popular Science Magazine's Brilliant 10, Silicon.com's 50 Most Influential People in Technology, and Technology Review's TR35: Young Innovators Under 35.
[edit] Biography
Von Ahn received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005 under the supervision of Manuel Blum and his B.S. in mathematics from Duke University in 2000. He attended the American School of Guatemala for his primary and secondary education.
Von Ahn's early work was in the field of cryptography. With Nick Hopper and John Langford, he was the first to provide rigorous definitions of steganography and to prove that private-key steganography is possible. He has also worked with the cryptographer Josh Benaloh.
In 2000, he did early work with Manuel Blum on CAPTCHAs, computer-generated tests that humans can pass but computers cannot. These devices are used by web sites to prevent automated programs, or bots, from perpetrating large-scale abuse, such as automatically registering for large numbers of accounts or purchasing huge number of tickets for resale by scalpers. CAPTCHAs brought von Ahn his first widespread fame among the general public due to its coverage in The New York Times, USA Today, Discovery Channel, NOVA scienceNOW, and other mainstream outlets.
Von Ahn's Ph.D. thesis, completed in 2005, was the first publication to use the term "human computation" that he had coined for methods that combine human brainpower with computers to solve problems that neither could solve alone. It was the first treatise to recognize the importance of human computation within computer science generally. 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. The most famous example is the ESP Game, an online game in which two randomly paired people are simultaneously shown the same picture, with no way to communicate. Each then lists a number of words or phrases that describe the picture within a time limit, and are rewarded with points for a match. This match turns out to be an accurate description of the picture, and can be successfully used in a database for more accurate image search technology. The ESP Game was licensed by Google in the form of the Google Image Labeler, and is used to improve the accuracy of the Google Image Search.[3] Other games include Peekaboom, a game for locating objects within an image, Verbosity, a game for collecting common-sense facts about the world, and Phetch, a game for annotating web images with explanatory text. Von Ahn's games brought him further coverage in the mainstream media. His thesis won the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.
More recently, von Ahn developed reCAPTCHA, a new form of CAPTCHA that also helps digitize books. In reCAPTCHA, the images of words displayed to the user come directly from old books that are being digitized; they are words that optical character recognition could not identify and are sent to people throughout the Web to be identified.
Von Ahn has used a number of unusual techniques in his teaching, which have won him multiple teaching awards at Carnegie Mellon University[4]. In the fall of 2008, he taught a new course at Carnegie Mellon entitled "Science of the Web".[1] One of the homework assignments in this class was to get web pages with the term "rankmaniac" ranked as highly as possible on Google.[2] The course also contained a contest to get as many unique visits as possible to a particular web site, and a re-creation of Milgram's small world experiment.[3] [4]
