Diversity & Innovation
A series highlighting Diversity and Inclusion in Innovation and Design Thinking
Luis von Ahn
February 22nd, 2021
Our new series, Diversity & Innovation picks up where our BIPOC in Design Thinking series left off last semester, this week featuring Luis von Ahn. Luis was born in Guatemala, a poorer country where he stated high-quality education is limited to the wealthy. He eventually earned a B.S. in Mathematics at Duke and a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon before he co-invented CAPTCHAs (the computer-generated tests used to differentiate between humans and bots on websites). After selling a few of his tech companies to Google, he worked there for several years before leaving to build a new platform, Duolingo, with the mission of bringing free language education to the world. Duolingo is currently one of the most popular ways to learn a language online, with over 300 million users. Additionally, he is a computer science professor at his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University.