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Severin Hacker | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 6, 1984 |
| Alma mater | ETH Zurich (BS) Carnegie Mellon University (PhD) |
| Known for | Duolingo |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Carnegie Mellon University, ETH Zurich |
| Doctoral advisor | Luis von Ahn |
Severin Hacker (born July 6, 1984) is a Swiss-American computer scientist who is the co-founder and CTO of Duolingo, the world's most popular language-learning platform. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Hacker was born and raised in Zug and studied at ETH Zurich. In a 2020 interview, Hacker specified that gaming played a large role in his interest in computer science: "What originally drew me to computers was video games and the desire to build your own games and understand how those games are built. I was somewhat obsessed." [5]
He moved to Pittsburgh to study at Carnegie Mellon University where he co-founded Duolingo with Luis von Ahn in 2009. [6]
He received his BS in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2006 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014.
Initially, Hacker and his former graduate advisor, Luis von Ahn, wanted to develop an application that could translate internet sites, so that they would be accessible for non-English speakers. They felt that automated translation software wasn't as effective as using the skills and knowledge of bilingual speakers. [7] During Hacker's doctoral studies, Duolingo became a by-product of this idea, or "happy mistake." [8] Hacker's goal for Duolingo was to make it "100% free" so the most disadvantaged person with an internet connection would still have access to it. [7]
Hacker and his team of PhD students used machine learning to personalize Duolingo to each user. Specifically, they wanted to predict what language concepts the user was on the verge of forgetting. In 2012, a study by American universities showed that spending 34 hours of learning on Duolingo was equivalent to a full-semester of a college language course. In 2015, Hacker and von Ahn started selling translations, such as to the Spanish tech news group of CNN. [9]
There are two parts to Hacker's "Retention Philosophy": learning should be fun and motivation should remain high. [9] Through Duolingo, Hacker wants users to have the option to increase their 'stay-tuned quota' which involves adjusting the learning time and difficulty of the course. Another idea derived from Hacker's philosophy was to apply gamification to Duolingo. This was to apply game elements and principles instead of classroom learning tools to the course. [9]
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, it became Carnegie Mellon University through its merger with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon and formerly a part of the University of Pittsburgh.
The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the best computer science programs over the decades. As of 2024 U.S. News & World Report ranks the graduate program as tied for No. 1 with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley.
Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy is an Indian-American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over 50 years. He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was instrumental in helping to create Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in India, to cater to the educational needs of the low-income, gifted, rural youth. He was the founding chairman of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He is the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award, in 1994, known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, for his work in the field of artificial intelligence.
Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley is a degree-granting branch campus of Carnegie Mellon University located in Mountain View, California. It was established in 2002 at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field.
Luis von Ahn is a Guatemalan-American entrepreneur, software developer, and consulting professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is known as one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing. He is the founder of the company reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009, and the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo.
The Human–Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) is a department within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is considered one of the leading centers of human–computer interaction research, and was named one of the top ten most innovative schools in information technology by Computer World in 2008. For the past three decades, the institute has been the predominant publishing force at leading HCI venues, most notably ACM CHI, where it regularly contributes more than 10% of the papers. Research at the institute aims to understand and create technology that harmonizes with and improves human capabilities by integrating aspects of computer science, design, social science, and learning science.
Carnegie Learning, Inc. is a provider of K–12 education services for math, literacy and ELA, world languages, and applied sciences, as well as high-dosage tutoring and professional learning.
Alan W Black is a Scottish computer scientist, known for his research on speech synthesis. He is a professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) is a research institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, and focuses on the area of language technologies. The institute is home to 33 faculty with the primary scholarly research of the institute focused on machine translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, information retrieval, parsing, information extraction, and multimodal machine learning. Until 1996, the institute existed as the Center for Machine Translation, which was established in 1986. Subsequently, from 1996 onwards, it started awarding degrees, and the name was changed to The Language Technologies Institute. The institute was founded by Professor Jaime Carbonell, who served as director until his death in February 2020. He was followed by Jamie Callan, and then Carolyn Rosé, as interim directors. In August 2023, Mona Diab became the director of the institute.
Jaime Guillermo Carbonell was a computer scientist who made seminal contributions to the development of natural language processing tools and technologies. His extensive research in machine translation resulted in the development of several state-of-the-art language translation and artificial intelligence systems. He earned his B.S. degrees in Physics and in Mathematics from MIT in 1975 and did his Ph.D. under Dr. Roger Schank at Yale University in 1979. He joined Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of computer science in 1979 and lived in Pittsburgh from then. He was affiliated with the Language Technologies Institute, Computer Science Department, Machine Learning Department, and Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon.
Babbel GmbH, operating as Babbel, is a German subscription-based language learning software and e-learning platform, available in various languages since January 2008.
The Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) is a department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It is located at the Pittsburgh Technology Center.
Duolingo, Inc., is an American educational technology company that produces learning apps and provides language certification. Duolingo offers courses on music, math, and 43 languages, ranging from English, French, and Spanish to less commonly studied languages such as Welsh, Irish, and Navajo, and even fictional languages such as Klingon. The learning method incorporates gamification to motivate users with points and rewards and interactive lessons featuring spaced repetition. The app promotes short, daily lessons for consistent-phased practice.
Priya Narasimhan is a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is also the CEO and founder of YinzCam, a U.S.-based technology company that provides the mobile fan experience for a number of professional sports teams and leagues in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Eric Poe Xing is an American computer scientist whose research spans machine learning, computational biology, and statistical methodology. Xing is founding President of the world’s first artificial intelligence university, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).
Peter Brusilovsky is a professor of information science and intelligent systems at the University of Pittsburgh. He is known as one of the pioneers of adaptive hypermedia, adaptive web design, and web-based adaptive learning. He has published numerous articles in user modeling, personalization, educational technology, intelligent tutoring systems, and information access. As of February 2015 Brusilovsky was ranked as #1 in the world in the area of computer education and #21 in the world in the area of World Wide Web by Microsoft Academic Search. According to Google Scholar as of April 2018, he has over 33,000 citations and h-index of 77. Brusilovsky's group has been awarded best paper awards at Adaptive Hypermedia, User Modeling, Hypertext, IUI, ICALT, and EC-TEL conference series, including five James Chen Best Student paper awards.
Chris Harrison is a British-born, American computer scientist and entrepreneur, working in the fields of human–computer interaction, machine learning and sensor-driven interactive systems. He is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Future Interfaces Group within the Human–Computer Interaction Institute. He has previously conducted research at AT&T Labs, Microsoft Research, IBM Research and Disney Research. He is also the CTO and co-founder of Qeexo, a machine learning and interaction technology startup.
Farnam Jahanian is an Iranian-American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and academic. He serves as the 10th president of Carnegie Mellon University.
Gabriela Hug-Glanzmann is a Swiss electrical engineer and an associate professor and Principal Investigator of the Power Systems Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich within the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Hug studies the control and optimization of electrical power systems with a focus on sustainable energy.
The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship is a startup incubator at Carnegie Mellon University.
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