Placed 3rd at 2018 VTURCS symposium

Congratulations to Crowd Lab undergraduate researcher Anne Hoang for winning 3rd place in the Faculty Choice category at the 2018 Virginia Tech Undergraduate Research in Computer Science (VTURCS) Symposium. There were 37 submissions including 22 capstone projects and 15 research projects.

Anne also won 1st place in the Capstone category and 1st place in the Marston Awards (industry pick) category. Amazing!

The Crowd Lab regularly participates in the VTURCS Symposium. Last year, our teams placed 1st and 3rd in the Faculty Choice category.

Presentation accepted for Collective Intelligence 2018

Our preliminary work on the Civil War Photo Sleuth project, which combines crowdsourcing and face recognition technology to identify unknown American Civil War soldier photos, was accepted to ACM Collective Intelligence 2018 in the most competitive oral presentation category (32% acceptance rate). We’ll be traveling to Zurich, Switzerland to present this work. The extended abstract is available online.

Congratulations to co-authors Crowd Lab Ph.D. student Vikram Mohanty and computer science undergraduate David Thames.

Preston Award for Best STEM Master’s Thesis

Congratulations to Crowd Lab alumna Rachel Kohler for winning the William Preston Society Award for Outstanding Master’s Thesis at Virginia Tech. The Preston Award recognizes the best original research with the potential to benefit all people. Rachel won in the STEM category, which includes any field of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics at VT.

According to a VT News article, “The William Preston Society is comprised of former members of the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors and the current president and past presidents of Virginia Tech.”

Rachel graduated from VT in 2017 with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science. Her thesis committee was Dr. Luther (chair), Dr. Chris North, and Dr. Mike Horning.

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.