Our Civil War Photo Sleuth project was featured in a TIME article by Olivia Waxman, “How Artificial Intelligence Is Helping Identify Thousands of Unknown Civil War Soldiers.” The article includes interviews with several prominent CWPS users showing how the software has benefited them by identifying unknown soldiers in Civil War-era photos.
Congrats to Vikram Mohanty, lead developer of CWPS and Crowd Lab Ph.D. student, for this publicity!
Dr. Luther and Dr. Sylvester Johnson, director of the Center for Humanities at Virginia Tech, co-presented on “The future of AI and what it means for humans” to local journalists at a media event called “On the Record with Virginia Tech” on October 17, 2019. The press release for the event described it as follows:
Technology is the changing the way we live and work. For centuries, being human has been described by emphasizing the ability to think and reason. But now technology innovation using Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help us mimic human-like behavior to make complicated decisions and solve world problems.
Virginia Tech’s Innovation Campus in Alexandria will focus on the intersection between technology and the human experience, leading the way not just in technical domains but also looking at the policy and ethical implications to ensure that technology doesn’t drive inequity.
What will it mean to be human as intelligent machines continue to advance? How is AI improving our lives? What are the dangers that more powerful AI might bring?
In this talk, Virginia Tech humanities scholar Sylvester Johnson and computer scientist Kurt Luther will share recent discoveries and explore how the latest technological advances in AI are changing our lives.
A video clip of the event was broadcast on a local TV news channel, WDVM.
Our Civil War Photo Sleuth project continues to attract press and media attention. Here is a roundup of additional articles since the last post:
Our Civil War Photo Sleuth project got a burst of publicity in recent weeks, leading to hundreds of new site registrations and contributions. Here is a round-up of some highlights:
Thanks to these media outlets for the great publicity!
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.
The Crowd Lab’s research on crowdsourced investigations was featured in an article, Crowd Sleuthing: Harnessing the Power of Crowds, by our local NPR affiliate, WVTF & Radio IQ. Dr. Luther is quoted multiple times discussing the lab’s Photo Sleuth and GroundTruth research projects, as well as general potential risks and benefits of crowd sleuthing. The story also includes an accompanying radio broadcast.
WVTF & RADIO IQ, the NPR affiliate for Southwest Virginia, produced a radio segment and accompanying article about our Incite software and the Mapping the Fourth of July project. The story includes quotes by Dr. Luther and Mapping the Fourth project director Dr. Paul Quigley.
Additionally, Richmond’s NPR affiliate produced a different radio segment and accompanying article about our project a few days later.
Coinciding with Independence Day, our Incite and Mapping the Fourth of July projects were again featured in VT News and on the university home page. The new press release covers the launch of our software and the accompanying exhibit on display in VT’s Newman Library throughout the month of July. Dr. Luther is quoted a couple times, including the following:
“Crowdsourcing is a powerful way to get the public involved in a historical project,” said Luther. “Our project asks the crowd to go beyond simple transcription and think about the meaning and context of these documents. This project allows transcribers to not just learn about the history of the Civil War, but to contribute authentically to new historical research by analyzing the digitized primary documents that cover a wide range of human experiences.”
These projects were also featured in a press release for last year’s Independence Day.
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.
Dr. Luther’s NSF CAREER Award, a five-year grant to study expert-led crowdsourcing and build a platform for crowdsourced photo investigations called CrowdSleuth, was covered in a press release by Virginia Tech News. This news story appeared on the home page for vt.edu and the VT College of Engineering.
