Received ICTAS Junior Faculty Award

Dr. Luther received an Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science (ICTAS) Junior Faculty Award. The award includes a two-year, $80,000 grant to support his lab’s research on using crowdsourcing and computer vision to identify people in historical and modern photographs. The co-PI on the grant is Prof. Paul Quigley of Virginia Tech’s History department.

Dr. Luther previously received a $10,000 seed grant from ICTAS to support his research on crowdsourcing and context slices, in collaboration with Dr. Chris North in the Computer Science department.

More details are available in the VT News press release.

Received NEH grant to expand Incite to WW2 history

Dr. Luther is Co-PI for a new award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program. The title of the project is “The American Soldier Collaborative Digital Archive.” The one-year, $50,000 award will support planning to expand our Incite software, originally developed for crowdsourced Civil War history, to the new domain of World War 2 history. The PI is Dr. Ed Gitre of Virginia Tech’s History Department.

Please read the press release, and the abstract below:

The American Soldier Collaborative Digital Archive is a project to make available to scholars and to the public a remarkable collection of written reflections on war and the armed forces by American soldiers who fought in the Second World War. In the 1940s, more than 60,000 military personnel responded in their own words to questions posed by the War Department’s new Research Branch about their time in the service. These survey responses were analyzed, summarized, and interpreted by a team of social and behavioral scientists, who after the war reported their findings in a four-volume work, The American Soldier (1949-50). While the Branch’s quantitative data was later digitized and is available through the Roper Center at Cornell University and the National Archives, the responses themselves, the very personal words of thousands of soldiers, have long remained available only to those who could to travel to Washington, DC to read the text on microfilm. Ultimately, we plan to build an online digital archive of approximately 72,000 images of the handwritten survey responses and to provide a tool that will allow these images to be transcribed by students, scholars, and the public so as to render the text searchable. In this way, we propose to quite literally write these tens of thousands of personal expressions of soldiers into the historical record. We are requesting $50,000 from the NEH to fund a yearlong planning process for this project that will enable discussions among experts from multiple organizations in military history, social science research, crowdsourced transcription, digital archiving, and interactive web design. By the end of the grant period year in spring of 2018, we will produce a list of any related primary or secondary material to be linked to or included in the digital archive; a document of technical requirements for the digital archive at its largest scale; a robust data management plan for the image and text data to ensure that it is accessible for the long term; an outreach plan to ensure that the project becomes known to willing transcribers and interested researchers; and a set of agreements concerning the work and other commitments required by involved organizations and individuals. This project seeks to contribute to the NEH’s “Common Ground” initiative and within it the “Standing Together” initiative.

Received NSF CAREER Award for expert-led crowdsourcing

Dr. Luther received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his proposal, titled, Transforming Investigative Science and Practice with Expert-Led Crowdsourcing. This program “offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.” The award is for $554,628 over a five-year period and is funded through the Cyber-Human Systems (CHS) core program.

Received NIH grant to study crowdsourced graph layouts

We received an NIH grant to study how crowdsourcing might be used to improve the layouts of biological graph visualizations. This project is a collaboration between Dr. Kurt Luther (MPI) and Dr. T.M. Murali (MPI) at Virginia Tech and Zooniverse, the world’s largest online citizen science portal. The grant is approximately $620,000 over two years and is part of the NIH’s Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) program.

Wikimedia funds enhancements to ProveIt

The Wikimedia Foundation has awarded a grant to Felipe Schenone to make improvements to ProveIt.

Dr. Luther led the team that developed ProveIt when he was at Georgia Tech. ProveIt is a Wikipedia gadget that provides a friendly user interface for managing references in Wikipedia articles. The gadget has since been integrated into the English-language Wikipedia and has over 7,000 active users. This work was also demoed at the WikiSym conference in 2009.