Luis von Ahn (CS 2003, 2005)

2021 Alumni Achievement Award

Bio

Luis von Ahn’s numerous contributions to technology impact the lives of people all over the world every day. His work bridges the gap between humans and computers to solve problems that neither would be able to accomplish individually. Building off his earlier CAPTCHA work with Manuel Blum, Luis invented reCAPTCHA, a security feature utilizing digitized text from old books to protect websites and applications from fraud and abuse. The company behind this technology, which he founded, was acquired by Google in 2009.

During his time as a CMU faculty member, his path intersected with Severin Hacker, and together they founded Duolingo. Within its first decade, Duolingo grew to become the world’s most popular language learning program. Considered a pioneer of crowdsourcing, Luis has received many awards and accolades in his career, including being named a MacArthur Fellow, one of 10 Most Brilliant Scientists by Popular Science magazine and 100 Most Innovative People in Business by Fast Company magazine.