He is the brains behind crowd sourcing projects that many people should be very familiar with by now: captcha - the human authentication program that prevents computer scripts from automatically accessing and signing up for things over the Internet.
Asides from the many alternative uses Captcha has come to inheret (such as the captcha meme website catchart - http://www.captchart.com) Luis von Ahn has come up with a brilliant use for the 10 seconds of time people waste every time they fill out a captcha. Currently there is a massive project by large companies like Google and Amazon to digitise millions of books. While computer programs can digitise most text in books after their pages are scanned, some words are difficult to identify and leaves the digitisation project incomplete. Luis von Ahn and the ingenious idea of using 're-captcha' to as a means to get human users to contribute to the identification of these words while they attempt to authenticate themselves on various websites.
Recaptcha now transcribes over 40 million words per day. To put that into perspective, if each word were to be placed back to back and in a straight line, within a mere hundred days recaptcha would be able transcribe a line of words that would envelope the entire circumference of the Earth.
It really shows the power of online collaboration and its ability to achieve amazing things.
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