A #CSforALL Conversation with Inventor & Entrepreneur Luis von Ahn
By Adriana Martinez, Electrical and Computer Engineering student at Carnegie Mellon University
Luis von Ahn will share his personal story live Tuesday, October 9 on stage at the CSforALL Summit. Watch here: FEATURED KEYNOTE: Dr. Luis von Ahn
On September 24, I had the pleasure of speaking with one of the most influential Latinos in the tech industry, Luis von Ahn, cofounder of both Duolingo and CAPTCHA. Von Ahn recently received the prestigious Lemelson-MIT prize and in addition, he has been named one of the “10 Most Brilliant Scientists” by Popular Science Magazine.
Von Ahn was born and raised in Guatemala but received his bachelor’s in mathematics from Duke University and obtained his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. As cofounder and CEO of Duolingo, a language-learning platform, von Ahn is on a mission to provide free language education access to the world.
Growing up, von Ahn saw limited opportunities in his home country of Guatemala.
“Having been born in Guatemala there was a 30% chance that I wouldn’t learn how to read and write.”
This inspired von Ahn to set big goals for himself.
“I wanted to study math but there was no way to study math in the whole country, it was ridiculous.”
This led von Ahn to venture beyond the boundaries of Guatemala and venture to the United States to continue his education.
Once in the US, von Ahn found an easy time adjusting. Although race disparities were present in the tech field, they did not prevent him from achieving greatness.
“One thing that has helped me was to not think about it. If you spend a lot of time obsessing about this then it can hurt you. If you start thinking ‘I’m the only Hispanic here’ you start to marginalize yourself. I think I was lucky, because I was Hispanic which is an outlier, but I was also a man which is not an outlier. I had the other checkboxes.”
For von Ahn, being a minority in the tech world did not mean having to hide his identity.
“I tell everyone I’m from Guatemala, to me the biggest thing is just to know deep down in yourself that just because you’re Hispanic, just because there are not many Hispanics in the field, it doesn’t mean that you are in any way lesser.”
Not only is von Ahn proud of his identity, but he also points out the importance his background and past experiences have had to him.
“The whole idea of Duolingo is based on the fact that [for] people in countries like Guatemala and other countries — there’s a lot of disparities. The rich people can buy themselves the best education in the world…where the poor people can barely even learn how to read and write. So, the whole idea with Duolingo is to give access to everybody. It’s the genesis of this company. In addition, I always saw how important it was to learn English, and the number one language being learned on Duolingo is English- people in the US don’t realize that.”
Von Ahn wants to use Duolingo to advance and adjust global education for all people, so everyone can have an equal opportunity in the modern world. Duolingo is a step in the right direction.
“At Duolingo, the majority of the school systems that we look at are terrible. It is very common that in non-English speaking countries…English teachers don’t know English. We have teachers teaching English and using Duolingo because they themselves don’t know English.”
Although von Ahn has already pushed boundaries and paved the way for a whole new intersection of technology and education, he hopes to have a much larger impact.
“I would want to be able to say that I moved the needle on something worldwide in terms of education so if we can really prove, at some point, that we increased the number of people that can read or write by five percent that would be amazing. With Duolingo, if we increased the number of people that were able to learn English by five or ten percent in the world, that would be amazing. Moving the needle in how people are educated is a big thing.”
When it comes to growing the number of Latinos in tech von Ahn believes having role models can make a big difference.
“I think convincing parents of the value of education seems like an important thing. In Hispanic communities, here in the US, this is a generalization which sounds terrible, but when you compare to other ethnicities, we don’t value education as much as other groups of people and this is a very complicated problem. I mean there are years of racism thrown in there, and tons of things, this is a very complex problem.”
Von Ahn feels that education in many Hispanic households is often not a priority and that teachers are not given the respect they deserve.
“When I came to the US, received my PhD and then became a professor at Carnegie Mellon, my whole family said, ‘all this education for you to become a teacher.’ This is the prevailing thinking there, if you were to become a teacher it is because you couldn’t find a job anywhere else. But that needs to change.”
Von Ahn feels that individual families and society should place more value on education and teachers need to paid more in accordance with the important work they’re doing in educating the next generation.
Finally, to any Hispanic and Latino students interested in pursuing STEM, von Ahn has this advice:
“Just do it! The internet is amazing. When I grew up I didn’t have as much of the internet that there is now. There’s a ton of free resources and I think people should try to make use of them. You can really teach yourself how to program. That’s something that didn’t exist when I was growing up, these free resources were not there or not as good, so I think people are in a better spot now than 20 years ago.”
Von Ahn feels the way to succeed is to take advantage of your resources and to ‘put your all’ into everything you do.
“I really do think that it’s all hard work. If you talk to anyone here, they’ll tell you that I’m not all that smart. It’s really hard work; I do work harder than everyone else.”
Von Ahn’s philosophy and story not only inspires, but also serves as a reminder that you can fix the world’s problems regardless of your background. Instead, we can use our adversities and struggles to identify problems that exist in the world and use our knowledge and unique experiences to solve them.
Adriana Martinez is a current Electrical and Computer Engineering student at Carnegie Mellon University pursuing her bachelor’s degree. She’s interested in using technology for good and helping underrepresented groups find their passion in STEM.
Luis von Ahn was born and raised in Guatemala and is an entrepreneur and computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who is considered one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing. He is known for co-inventing CAPTCHAs, being a MacArthur Fellow and selling two companies to Google in his 20s.
He is currently the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, a language-learning platform created to bring free language education to the world. With over 300 million users, it is now the most popular language-learning platform and the most downloaded app in the Education category worldwide on both iTunes and Google Play.
Luis has been named one of the 10 Most Brilliant Scientists by Popular Science Magazine, one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover, one of the Top Young Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review, one of the 100 Most Innovative People in Business by Fast Company Magazine and the winner of the 2018 Lemelson-MIT prize.
