Lukas Biewald is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco, California. Biewald is CEO of CrowdFlower (formerly Dolores Labs) — an Internet company that breaks large digital projects into small tasks and distributes them to workers around the world — which he co-founded in December 2007 with Chris Van Pelt.

Background

Prior to co-founding CrowdFlower, Biewald was a Senior Scientist and Manager within the Ranking and Management Team at Powerset

Powerset (company)

Powerset is a Microsoft owned company based in San Francisco, California that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet....

, a natural language search technology company later acquired by Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

.

From 2005 to 2006, Biewald led the Search Relevance Team for Yahoo! Japan

Yahoo! Japan

is a Japanese internet company formed as a joint venture between the American internet company Yahoo! and the Japanese internet company SoftBank. It is headquartered at Midtown Tower in the Tokyo Midtown complex in Akasaka, Minato, Tokyo.-History:...

, where he focused on using statistical machine learning approaches to improve the web search ranking function for international markets.

Awards and Honors

In 2010, he won the Netexplorateur Prize for creating the GiveWork iPhone app, which allows users to perform small tasks that assist refugees and people in developing countries. Later that year, Inc. Magazine included Biewald and Van Pelt on its list of the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30.

Biewald and Van Pelt launched CrowdFlower as a product of Dolores Labs at TechCrunch50 in 2009, where the company placed as a finalist.

He is the author of several academic papers on applications of crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community through an open call....

, as well as a chapter on crowdsourcing gender and age stereotypes in O'Reilly Media's Beautiful Data that he co-authored with Brendan O'Connor.

Academic Life

Biewald holds an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Mathematics from Stanford University.

While pursuing his Master's in Computer Science at Stanford University, Biewald won the California Institute of Technology Turing Tournament.