Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also received his Ph.D . in 2005 u...
Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also received his Ph.D . in 2005 under the supervision of Manuel Blum. Previously, von Ahn obtained a B.S. in mathematics from Duke University in 2000. He is the recipient of a Microsoft Research Fellowship, and became a MacArthur Fellow (a.k.a ., the "genius award") in 2006. His research includes
CAPTCHAs and Human-based computation. He was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala.
Luis von Ahn developed the
ESP Game, a game in which two people are simultaneously given an image of the same picture, with no way to communicate. Each then lists a number of words/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 employed in a database for more accurate image search technology. The ESP Game has been licensed by Google in the form of the Google Image Labeler, and is used to improve the accuracy of the Google Image Search.
More recently, von Ahn developed
reCAPTCHA, a new form of CAPTCHA that also helps digitize books. In reCAPTCHA, the words displayed to the user come directly from old books that are being digitized; they are words that OCR could not identify and are therefore sent to people throughout the Web to be proofread. With this method, von Ahn is planning ot proofread millions of words per day by just having people solve CAPTCHAs on the Web.
(From Wikipedia, 7/15/07)
