Month: March 2019

More press for Civil War Photo Sleuth

Courtesy: Matt Gentry/Roanoke Times

Our Civil War Photo Sleuth project continues to attract press and media attention. Here is a roundup of additional articles since the last post:

Best Paper Award at IUI 2019

Dr. Kurt Luther (center) receives the IUI 2019 Best Paper Award from PC co-chairs Oliver Brdiczka (left) and Polo Chau (right). Photo courtesy John Wenskovitch.

Our paper, “Photo Sleuth: Combining Human Expertise and Face Recognition to Identify Historical Portraits,” received the Best Paper Award at IUI 2019 in Los Angeles, CA. This award recognized the best paper among 282 submissions. Congratulations to lead author Vikram Mohanty (CS Ph.D. student), David Thames (CS undergraduate), and Sneha Mehta (CS Ph.D. student).

Presented at Civil War Photo Talks

Courtesy: Kerone Wetter

Dr. Luther gave an invited presentation, titled “Civil War Photo Sleuthing: Past, Present, and Future” at Civil War Photo Talks in Arlington, VA, co-sponsored by Military Images Magazine and Civil War Faces. Other invited speakers included Ann Shumard, National Portrait Gallery; Micah Messenheimer, Library of Congress; Bryan Cheeseboro, National Archives; and Rick Brown, Military Images. The abstract for Dr. Luther’s talk was as follows:

People have struggled to identify unknown soldiers and sailors in Civil War photos since even before the war ended. In this talk, I trace the 150-year history of photo sleuthing, showing how the passage of time has magnified some challenges, but also unlocked exciting new possibilities. I show how technologies like social media, face recognition, and digital archives allow us to solve photo mysteries that have eluded families and researchers for a century and a half.

Paper accepted to CHI 2019 HCI + AI workshop

Our paper, “Flud: a hybrid crowd-algorithm approach for visualizing biological networks,” was accepted to the CHI 2019 workshop titled, Where is the Human? Bridging the Gap Between AI and HCI, in Glasgow, Scotland. Congratulations to Crowd Lab co-authors Aditya Bharadwaj (Ph.D. student) and David Gwizdala (undergraduate researcher), as well as Yoonjin Kim and Aditya’s co-advisor, Dr. T.M. Murali.