When Duo was born, von Ahn had three active NSF awards from NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, including a prestigious NSF CAREER award which also supported then-graduate student Karin Tsai, now the senior director of engineering for Duolingo.įunding continued during Duolingo's early development and growth, totaling over $1.5 million from 2009 to 2016. In the case of Duolingo, the original goal of the NSF-driven research was to harness the knowledge of bilingual people to supplement translation software on internet sites.Ĭredit: Courtesy of Duolingo Severin Hacker and Luis von Ahnĭuolingo was founded in 2011 by von Ahn, and Duolingo Chief Technology Officer Severin Hacker, who was a Carnegie Mellon graduate student supported by NSF at the time.

When people typed the letters and numbers of difficult-to-read curvy and blurred text, this information was used to help digitize old, printed media that computers couldn't decipher yet.

CAPTCHA, for example, had an added benefit beyond protecting websites from automated activities.

Luis von Ahn's research centered on human computation systems, a method of improving computational models by collecting data as a byproduct of someone doing something else, like playing a game. ITR awards were meant to encourage and stimulate innovative, high-risk and high-return multidisciplinary research that would help prepare Americans for the information age by extending the frontiers of information technology and improving our understanding of its impacts on society.įrom this research, von Ahn helped create reCAPTCHA, a system that anyone who uses the internet has encountered as it distinguishes between human and automated web domain access (i.e., the 'Are you a robot?' question). The program was a funding priority established in the early 2000s in response to a report created by the president's Information Technology Advisory Committee. NSF supported Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn from graduate school through his early career research as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.Īs a doctoral student in computer science and postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon, von Ahn was supported by the Information Technology Research, or ITR, program. Credit: Courtesy of Duolingo A user on the Duolingo app

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