Author: Kurt Luther
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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…
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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.…
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Paper accepted to CHI 2018 Sensemaking workshop
Our paper, Crowdsourcing Intelligence Analysis with Context Slices, was accepted to the CHI 2018 Sensemaking in a Senseless World workshop in the most competitive long presentation category (21% acceptance rate). Congratulations to Crowd Lab co-authors Tianyi Li (Ph.D. student) and Asmita Shah (undergraduate researcher), as well as Tianyi’s co-advisor, Dr. Chris North. Dr. Luther gave the…
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Systems of Truth panel at ICAT PlayDate
Dr. Luther, Dr. Andrea Kavanaugh (CHCI), and Prof. Deborah Tatar (Computer Science) participated in a panel at the ICAT PlayDate about the Designing Socio-Technical Systems of Truth workshop. The slides from the panel are available here. More details on the workshop are available on the workshop website and a previous blog post.
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Workshop on Designing Socio-Technical Systems of Truth
Dr. Luther chaired the “Designing Socio-Technical Systems of Truth” workshop at Virginia Tech on March 1-2, 2018. The workshop brought together over 50 faculty, student, and staff attendees to discuss the role of social technologies in promoting truth and preventing misinformation. Computer Science, History, Sociology, Communication, and Science and Technology Studies were just some of…
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Reflections on Agile Research University
Since our Crowd Lab builds and studies crowdsourcing systems, I often think about how our research might apply to ourselves. Research labs can have surprising overlap with online labor markets like Amazon Mechanical Turk and Upwork, in both positive and less flattering ways. Shared characteristics might include transient workers, mixed levels of experience, diverse motivations, technology-mediated…
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Interviewed for VT Engineer magazine
Dr. Luther was one of four 2017 winners of the NSF CAREER Award who was interviewed for the inaugural issue of VT Engineer magazine. You can read the article here.
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Paper accepted for CHI 2018
Our full paper on CrowdLayout, a system that uses crowdsourcing to design better layouts of biological network visualizations, was accepted for the CHI 2018 conference in Montreal, Canada. The acceptance rate for this top-tier HCI conference was 26% (of 2,590 submissions). Congrats to Crowd Lab alumni Divit Singh and Lee Lisle, and collaborator Dr. T.M.…
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Serving as papers co-chair for ACM Creativity & Cognition 2019
Dr. Luther will serve as technical papers co-chair, with Dr. Ali Mazalek (Ryerson University), of ACM Creativity & Cognition 2019, to be held in San Diego, CA, and co-located with DIS 2019.
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Presented at Northwestern University Segal Design Seminar
Dr. Luther gave an invited talk, Solving Photo Mysteries with Expert-Led Crowdsourcing, at Northwestern University’s Segal Design Institute. Thanks to Prof. Haoqi Zhang for the invitation, and to the audience for attending and asking great questions.