Here are five standout moments from this year’s event, which took place virtually December 6 through December 14:
Luis von Ahn started with a dream: A computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he wanted to teach the world. He and Ph.D. student Severin Hacker founded Duolingo, the language learning app, to do it.
Today Duolingo is the most popular way in the world to learn a new language, and it has been downloaded half a billion times. While just 94,000 people are native speakers of Irish, von Ahn said at the conference, more than a million people are learning Irish on Duolingo.
The company is using artificial intelligence to do things like figure out which parts of language to teach first, and to customize learning based on your responses and what you struggle with.
“Many people don’t realize that those lessons are actually personalized for every user,” he said.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Duke University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, von Ahn founded reCAPTCHA in 2007, the popular “I am not a robot” Web verification service. He cofounded Duolingo in 2011 and remains both CEO and a board member.
Luis von Ahn Is Using AI To Teach You New Languages
CEO & Cofounder, Duolingo
I started with this mission to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. [But] we were thinking education is very general, so maybe
we should start by teaching one thing.”
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LUIS VON AHN
