Luis von Ahn
PopTech 2009
You’ve undoubtedly seen Luis von Ahn’s work before. If you’ve ever deciphered a series of squiggly characters when signing up for a free email account, or when buying concert tickets online, you’ve encountered von Ahn’s “CAPTCHAs,” an ingenious and widely adopted method for thwarting spambots and curbing online cheating. In this and other research efforts, Professor von Ahn’s motivation is simple: to leverage the combined computational power of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems—and in ways that are painless, efficient, even fun.
His field of “human computation” takes it on faith that big groups of networked human minds can make computers smarter. But von Ahn has also proven that it’s possible to harness our leisure hours in unprecedented and novel ways. His “Games With A Purpose” employ addictive online games to collect human perceptions that are then used to train computer algorithms. (Find them at gwap.com.)
“Basically, I want to make all of humanity more efficient by exploiting the human cycles that get wasted,” von Ahn says.” He works in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship, and a Sloan Research Fellowship, among other honors. His personal website will lead you to a list of 1,300+ English terms that you probably shouldn’t use on yours.
Watch Luis von Ahn’s talk at PopTech 2009