{"id":3019,"date":"2026-05-15T12:00:54","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T16:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.com\/show\/?p=3019"},"modified":"2026-05-15T18:33:01","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T22:33:01","slug":"luis-von-ahn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.org\/show\/luis-von-ahn","title":{"rendered":"Luis von Ahn"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"intro\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.com\/show\/images\/guests\/LuisvonAhn.jpg\" alt=\"Luis von Ahn\" \/>Luis is an inventor and computer science professor at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cylab.cmu.edu\/education\/faculty\/vonahn-luis.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Carnegie Mellon<\/a>. He is one of the creators of CAPTCHA, a system that allows websites to determine whether you\u2019re a human or a computer. CAPTCHAs are wavy, distorted words that people need to type out when they\u2019re submitting a form to a website. Luis\u2019 company <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/recaptcha\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ReCAPTCHA<\/a> proved users were humans while also digitizing books. The company was sold to Google in 2009. He also founded the language learning app <a href=\"https:\/\/www.duolingo.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Duolingo<\/a>, attracting over 150 million users in its first four years. Luis won a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.macfound.org\/fellows\/793\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Macarthur Genius Grant<\/a> in 2006.<\/p>\n<p>Luis speaks with Jessica Harris about how he launched ReCaptcha and Duolingo, from scratch.<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"wpaudio\" href=\"https:\/\/fromscratchradio.com\/audio\/LuisVonAhn-FromScratch-051526.mp3\">Listen to the interview<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Luis is an inventor and computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon. He is one of the creators of CAPTCHA, a system that allows websites to determine whether you\u2019re a human or a computer. CAPTCHAs are wavy, distorted words that people need to type out when they\u2019re submitting a form to a website. Luis\u2019 company ReCAPTCHA [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","category-guests"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.org\/show\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.org\/show\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.org\/show\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.org\/show\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.org\/show\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3019"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.org\/show\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4418,"href":"https:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.org\/show\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019\/revisions\/4418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.org\/show\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.org\/show\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fromscratchradio.org\/show\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}