Luis von Ahn on reCaptcha, Duolingo and on radical-scale crowdsourcing

Massive-scale online collaboration

Luis von Ahn:

“Dr. Luis von Ahn (born in 1979 in Guatemala City, Guatemala) is an entrepreneur and an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.^[2] He is known as one of the pioneers of the idea of crowdsourcing. He is the founder of the company reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009.

[…]

Siglo Veintiuno, a leading newspaper in Guatemala, chose him as the person of the year in 2009. In 2011, Foreign Policy Magazinein Spanish named him the most influential intellectual of Latin America and Spain.^[7]

[…]

In July 2006, von Ahn gave a tech talk at Google on “Human Computation” (i.e., crowdsourcing) that became viral and was watched by over one million viewers.”

Here is the video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143