The Crowd Lab fared well at this year’s annual VTURCS (Virginia Tech Undergraduate Research in Computer Science) Spring Symposium. Civil War Photo Sleuth won first place, and Flud won third place, in the Faculty Choice Awards category. Over 30 projects were judged at the symposium, and the awards include a cash prize. Congratulations to Nam, Abby, David, and their graduate student mentors on this accomplishment!
Dr. Luther presented the lab’s research on crowdsourced image geolocation and the GroundTruth project at Carnegie Mellon University. He was an invited speaker for the Crowdsourcing Lunch Seminar hosted by the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII).
Some preliminary results from our interview study of crowdsourced image geolocation will be be presented as a poster at Collective Intelligence 2017 in New York City. Rachel Kohler, a computer science master’s student in the Crowd Lab, is leading this study, with assistance from Caroline Ritchey, an undergraduate double-majoring in national security and history.
Dr. Paul Quigley and Dr. David Hicks presented our Mapping the Fourth of July project and Incite software at the 96th annual conference of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) in Washington, D.C. The title of our presentation was, “New Directions For Inquiry: Citizen Student Archivists Crowdsourcing the Past.”
Dr. T.M. Murali presented our GraphCrowd research at the 2016 NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) All Hands Meeting in Bethesda, MD. This is an annual invitation-only meeting for researchers funded by the NIH BD2K initiative. We had both a poster and a presentation accepted; the poster can be viewed on F1000Research.
Dr. Luther and collaborator Dr. Paul Quigley of Virginia Tech’s Dept. of History presented their work on Mapping the Fourth of July in the Civil War Era and a new digital history project, Civil War Photo Sleuth. These invited presentations were part of a meeting on Civil War History and Digital Methodology hosted by the new Nau Center for Civil War History at UVA.
Human-Centered Design PhD student Navid Fallah and Dr. Luther presented their research, Supporting Emergency Evacuations with Wearable and Crowd Technologies, at the weekly ICAT PlayDate, co-sponsored by ICAT and the Center for HCI at Virginia Tech.
Divit Singh, a member of the Crowd Lab and computer science MS student co-advised by Dr. Luther and Dr. T.M. Murali, successfully defended his master’s thesis today. Divit contributed to GraphSpace, an online hub for sharing biological network data; and GraphCrowd, an extension for crowdsourcing the visualization of these networks. Divit also conducted several experiments showing that GraphCrowd generates network layouts that are as effective as those created by expert biologists. Congrats Divit!
Dr. Luther gave an invited talk on historical photo sleuthing at Virginia Tech’s 25th Annual Civil War Weekend. His presentation was featured
in a press release from Virginia Tech News.
Dr. Luther, with his collaborators Dr. Paul Quigley and Dr. David Hicks, led a workshop, titled “Crowdsourcing the History of American Independence Day in Civil War-Era Virginia,” at the 2016 Virginia Forum in Jamestown, Virginia. The workshop included a demo of our Incite software and the Mapping the Fourth of July website.
