Kurt Luther

About

Kurt Luther is an Associate Professor and Associate Director for Research at the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech. His research interests include crowdsourcing, social computing, and human-AI collaboration. He holds a Ph.D. in human-centered computing from Georgia Tech, earned in 2012, and a B.S. in computer graphics technology from Purdue University, obtained in 2006. Luther is based at the Institute for Advanced Computing in Alexandria, Virginia, and is involved in advancing understanding and development in the fields of social computing and human-AI interaction.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Public relations
• Ecology
• Engineering ethics
• Art
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Human-in-the-loop for computer vision assurance: A survey

  Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence · 2023 · 21 citations

  DOI

• CrowdSolve

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2021 · 18 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Investigators in fields such as journalism and law enforcement have long sought the public's help with investigations. New technologies have also allowed amateur sleuths to lead their own crowdsourced investigations - that have traditionally only been the purview of expert investigators - with mixed results. Through an ethnographic study of a four-day, co-located event with over 250 attendees, we examine the human infrastructure responsible for enabling the success of an expert-led crowdsourced…

  DOI

• Photo Sleuth

  ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems · 2020 · 13 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Identifying people in historical photographs is important for preserving material culture, correcting the historical record, and creating economic value, but it is also a complex and challenging task. In this article, we focus on identifying portraits of soldiers who participated in the American Civil War (1861--65), the first widely photographed conflict. Many thousands of these portraits survive, but only 10%--20% are identified. We created Photo Sleuth, a web-based platform that combines crow…

  DOI

• Understanding the Relationship Between Social Identity and Self-Expression Through Animated Gifs on Social Media

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2024-04-17 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  GIFs afford a high degree of personalization, as they are often created from popular movie and video clips with diverse and realistic characters, each expressing a nuanced emotional state through a combination of characters' own unique bodily gestures and distinctive visual backgrounds. These properties of high personalization and embodiment provide a unique window for exploring how individuals represent and express themselves on social media through the lens of the GIFs they use. In this study,…

  PublisherDOI

• CoSINT: Designing a Collaborative Capture the Flag Competition to Investigate Misinformation

  2023-07-10 · 9 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Crowdsourced investigations shore up democratic institutions by debunking misinformation and uncovering human rights abuses. However, current crowdsourcing approaches rely on simplistic collaborative or competitive models and lack technological support, limiting their collective impact. Prior research has shown that blending elements of competition and collaboration can lead to greater performance and creativity, but crowdsourced investigations pose unique analytical and ethical challenges. In t…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CHS: Small: Supporting Crowdsourced Sensemaking in Big Data with Dynamic Context Slices

  NSF · $532k · 2015–2019

• GraphCrowd: Using Crowdsourced Design to Visualize Effects of Environmental Chemicals on Signaling Networks

  NIH · $615k · 2016–2019

• CAREER: Transforming Investigative Science and Practice with Expert-Led Crowdsourcing

  NSF · $579k · 2017–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Daria Cybulska

  14 shared

• Pip Willcox

  National Archives

  14 shared

• Meghan Ferriter

  Library of Congress

  14 shared

• Ben Brumfield

  14 shared

• Denise Burgher

  14 shared

• Michael Haley Goldman

  14 shared

• Brendon Wilkins

  14 shared

• Austin Mast

  14 shared

Education

• Ph.D., School of Interactive Computing

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  2012

• B.S., Department of Computer Graphics Technology

  Purdue University

  2006

Similar researchers at Virginia Tech

• Wenjing Louh-77
• Doug Bowmanh-56
• Wu-chun Fengh-46