Luis von Ahn

Educational equity technologist

Crowdsourcing pioneer and Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn builds systems that combine the skills of humans and computers to take on large-scale problems neither can solve alone.

Why you should listen

Luis von Ahn is an entrepreneur and former professor at Carnegie Mellon University known for co-inventing CAPTCHAs, being a MacArthur Fellow and selling two companies to Google in his twenties. He is the cofounder and CEO of Duolingo, the world’s most popular language-learning platform and most downloaded education app, which allows you to learn languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Navajo, Zulu — even Klingon! — for free.

von Ahn’s work takes advantage of the ever-growing, internet-connected population to achieve collaboration in unprecedented numbers. He was named one of the “10 Most Brilliant Scientists” by Popular Science and one of the “100 Most Innovative People in Business” by Fast Company; in 2018 he won the Lemelson-MIT Prize honoring world-changing inventors.

Luis von Ahn’s TED talk

16:39

Luis von Ahn

Massive-scale online collaboration

Posted Dec 2011

More news and ideas from Luis von Ahn

Live from TED2023

Discovering how our brains might soon get upgraded: Notes on Session 6 of TED2023

April 19, 2023

In a mind-bending Session 6 of TED2023, neurotech, mental health and breakthroughs in brain-computer interfaces took the mainstage, with seven incredible speakers sharing ideas on how our brains may soon get an upgrade. The event: Talks from Session 6 of TED2023: Possibility, hosted by TED’s head of curation Helen Walters When and where: Wednesday, April […]