von Ahn's area of work is in human computation, which specifically refers to the augmentation or replacement of some part of a computer-based computation process with human calculation. CAPTCHA is a good example of human computation, because it augments the problem of OCR by sourcing the identification of OCR-hard characters to people on a massive and automatic basis. Human computation allows you to formulate algorithms that are too hard for computers to do and too laborious for people to do into a sort of "average" between the two. This gives you a lot of leverage and allows you to do some neat stuff, like the above.
If you didn't know, von Ahn's main claim to fame is having founded re-CAPTCHA and then having marshaled the company through a successful Google acquisition. After that I think he became professor at CMU, where he is currently.
EDIT: a more scholarly examination of the differences between human computation and related fields is here:
http://alexquinn.org/papers/Human%20Computation,%20A%20Surve...
Source: I was there and doing research for him when all this happened.
I listened to the interview, read the website, and read through the quora page, and didn't notice this even mentioned. Did I miss it?
I have always thought that if you could simplify language learning enough and maybe add some of the addictive game elements that games like World of Warcraft have, people would not look at it as a chore but rather pour themselves into to it.