Pitt professor, DuoLingo co-founder will be inducted into National Inventors Hall of Fame

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Pitt professor, DuoLingo co-founder will be inducted into National Inventors Hall of Fame

Patrick Varine | Tuesday, January 10, 2023 4:00 p.m.

Courtesy of U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Above, Rory Cooper, director at Pitt’s Human Engineering Resarch Laboratories, was recognized with one of its inventor trading cards, joining the likes of Thomas Edison and George Washington Carver.

Two Pittsburgh residents will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame’s 2023 class, hall officials announced earlier this month.

Rory Cooper, a University of Pittsburgh professor and founder of the Human Engineering Research Laboratories, and DuoLingo CEO Luis von Ahn are among 16 innovation pioneers whose inventions range from wheelchair technology to the creation of a corrosion-resistant stainless steel alloy.

They will be recognized in fall 2023 in partnership with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, at an event in Washington, D.C., that will also celebrate the 50th anniversary of the hall’s founding in 1973.

Cooper was a U.S. Army veteran stationed in Germany in 1980 when a bicycle accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. He then enrolled at California Polytechnic State University, and when he became frustrated that his 80-pound chrome and steel wheelchair was difficult to maneuver on campus, he went into his family’s shop to design his own ultralight wheelchair.

Informed by his own experience as a disabled veteran, Cooper’s work as a biomedical engineer has led to improved manual and electric wheelchairs. Among his inventions is the ergonomic dual surface wheelchair push-rim, a wheelchair accessory designed to relieve stress on the wheelchair pusher’s upper body.

That work also earned Cooper his own trading card, issued through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and celebrating inventors.

Courtesy of U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Above, Rory Cooper, director at Pitt’s Human Engineering Resarch Laboratories, was recognized with one of its inventor trading cards, joining the likes of Thomas Edison and George Washington Carver.

Cooper has also won a bronze medal at the 1988 Seoul Paralympics in the 4×400-meter wheelchair relay and more than 200 medals in the National Veterans Wheelchair Games.

Computer scientist Luis von Ahn co-invented the Completely Automated Turing test for telling Computers and Humans Apart, better known as CAPTCHA. Today it is a well-known security feature used by websites.

Ahn also co-founded DuoLingo, an online platform that is among the world’s most popular for learning new languages.

Von Ahn was born and raised in Guatemala. The son of physicians, von Ahn earned his bachelor’s degree at Duke University and his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. He joined the faculty at CMU’s School of Computer Science in 2006.

Along with his doctoral adviser Manual Blum, von Ahn co-invented CAPTCHA in 2000. The now-ubiquitous boxes that are a part of online forms improve cyber-security by blocking bots.

reCAPTCHA, invented by von Ahn in 2007 and sold to Google in 2009, takes scanned texts and helps digitize books. The program captures texts from two million books each year, and has digitized 13 million articles from the archives of the New York Times.

Tribune-Review Luis von Ahn co-founder and CEO of Duolingo.

Von Ahn was born and raised in Guatemala. The son of physicians, he earned his bachelor’s degree at Duke University and his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. He joined the faculty at CMU’s School of Computer Science in 2006.

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