Month: May 2017

Dr. Luther presented the lab’s research on crowdsourced image geolocation and the GroundTruth project at Stanford University. He was an invited speaker for the Seminar on People, Computers, and Design hosted by the Stanford HCI Group. A video of the talk is available here.

Rachel Kohler, a computer science MS student advised by Dr. Luther, successfully defended her master’s thesis today. Rachel conducted interviews with geolocation experts that led to an accepted poster at the upcoming Collective Intelligence 2017 conference. She then led the development of GroundTruth, a software tool that uses crowdsourcing to support expert geolocators. She also conducted several experiments showing that crowds can substantially narrow down an expert’s search space. Congrats Rachel!

Dr. Luther’s panel, titled “The Design, Development and Implementation of Funded Transdisciplinary Digital History Projects: Illustrative Cases of K-16 Collaboration in Action,” was accepted for the 132nd annual meeting of the American Historical Association, to be held January 4-7, 2018, in Washington, D.C. The panel will introduce two funded digital history projects, including Mapping the Fourth of July in the Civil War Era, that enhance the teaching of historical inquiry in K-16 settings. The panelists include Craig Perrier (Fairfax Public Schools), Paul Quigley (Virginia Tech), David Hicks (Virginia Tech), Kelly McPherson (Montgomery County Public Schools), Dr. Luther, and David Cline (Virginia Tech).

The Crowd Lab was well represented at the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) Creativity & Innovation Day, an annual event at VT full of demos, presentations, and artworks that represent the cutting-edge intersection of art, design, science, and engineering.

We presented demos for five of our projects: Civil War Photo Sleuth, Connect the Dots, GroundTruth, Incite, and Personalized Paths. It was a pleasure to share our work with many VT faculty members, staff, students, and members of the Blacksburg community.