The Guatemalan Luis von Ahn, a professor in the School of Computer Science Carmegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (USA) today launched a beta version of a free site for learning languages.
The new draft Von Ahn, who at 33 has been considered one of the 50 most influential people in the world of technology, is the web http://duolingo.com
The system assesses students by level and provides simple sentences to translate.
If the user does not know a word, the program reveals its meaning and hints for the student to remember the next time.
At the same time can see how they have translated the same sentence as other students from anywhere in the world and start learning the language dynamically. Once past a certain level, more complex sentences are introduced.
So far have begun with the Spanish and German, but later came the French, Italian and Chinese.
Von Ahn, a graduate in Computer Science in 2003 by Duke University (North Carolina) and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) in 2005, was included in this year's top 10 New Faces of Ibero-American thought Foreign Policy magazine.
Its success lies in trying to develop programs using the human capacity to solve problems that computers are not yet able to solve.
It is especially known for Captcha and ReCaptcha program, a computer security application that uses distorted letters and numbers that the user has to type correctly in a section blank.
This application incorporates many websites to block automatically generated spam and network attacks, and that only humans are able to fill that space.
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