Innovation
18 January 2008
Young Innovator Profile: Luis von Ahn
Luis von Ahn has a lofty vision and a short attention span. The 29-year-old computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, prefers short stories to novels, TV shows to short stories, and the Internet to all of the above. If others share his liabilities, so much the better: He plans to harness his generation’s fabled impatience to change the world.
“The grandest projects of humanity took on the order of 100,000 people,” he says. “The Panama Canal, the pyramids of Egypt. Now, for the first time in history, we can easily get more people than that working together. Imagine what we could do with 500 million people.”
The trick is getting them all to cooperate. Like Tom Sawyer, von Ahn has found a simple and mischievous solution: Turn the task into a game. Computer solitaire eats up billions of person-hours a year, he points out, and does nobody any good. But he says his “games with a purpose” will accomplish all sorts of useful tasks. Players will translate documents from one language to another or make it easier for blind people to navigate the Web — all while having fun. And unless they pay attention to the fine print, they may not even know they’re doing good.
What excites researchers about von Ahn’s “human computation” work, as he calls it, is less the prospect of getting people to accomplish boring, repetitive chores than the promise of training computers to do the chores themselves. Many tasks that are easy for people are surprisingly difficult for computers, especially those that children learn easily, such as classifying objects, recognizing faces, learning verbal languages, and reading handwriting.
Michael Kearns, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, says: “There are lots of people studying the hard problem of teaching computers to learn, and lots of other people seeing the entertainment value of the Web. But it’s rare to find somebody like von Ahn, who has thought deeply about how to combine the two.”
His “big goal,” von Ahn says, is to make computers able to do anything that people can do. “I think it’ll happen, definitely. If not in 50 years, then 100.”
In the meantime, von Ahn is teaming up with the Internet Archive, a digital library, to get computer users to help digitize old library books by, for example, typing out difficult-to-read words from scanned books when they apply for e-mail accounts. He’s also working for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on a game to help airport baggage screeners with their jobs by drawing their attention to important details in X-ray scans. And with graduate student Severin Hacker and programmer Michael Crawford, von Ahn is developing a game to rank pictures in a sort of aesthetic order: He plans to use the data to teach computers about beauty. So far, puppies and babies are near the top. Aesthetes might object. But von Ahn is unlikely to be deterred.
“Luis is fearless,” says Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Manuel Blum, von Ahn’s former adviser. “He’s willing to strike out in directions that few would dare to go.”
This article is excerpted from “The Player” by Polly Shulman, which originally appeared in SMITHSONIAN, October 2007. Polly Shulman is a writer and editor for Science magazine and the author of the novel Enthusiasm, an Austenesque romantic comedy about two teenage girls in New York.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
