Dr. Kurt Luther

Dr. Kurt Luther is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He is also the associate director for research in the Center for Human-Computer Interaction, faculty co-lead for the Open-Source Intelligence Lab, and a faculty affiliate of the Department of History and National Security Institute. His research interests include crowdsourcing, social computing, and human-AI collaboration. He currently serves as steering committee co-chair for the AAAI Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) conference and associate editor of the journal ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems. He is a member of AAAI and a senior member of ACM.

Dr. Luther directs Virginia Tech’s Crowd Intelligence Lab. His team researches the complementary strengths of crowdsourced human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI). The lab’s current projects focus on improving Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) collection and analysis, combating disinformation and misinformation, identifying unknown people and places in historical and modern photos, and understanding real-world crowdsourced investigations.

Dr. Luther has been honored with the National Science Foundation CAREER Award; the Purdue University Outstanding Technology Alumni Award; and the Virginia Tech College of Engineering Dean’s Awards for Excellence in Outreach, Faculty Fellow, and Outstanding New Assistant Professor. His papers have received the ACM CSCW Best Paper Award, the AAAI HCOMP Notable Paper Award, and the ACM IUI Best Paper Award. His software has won the Microsoft Cloud AI Research Challenge Grand Prize and three HCOMP Best Demo Awards. His research has been funded by CCI, DOD, Google, NEH, NHPRC, NIH, and NSF; and featured by The Atlantic, CNN, The History Channel, NPR, Smithsonian, TIME, and The Wall Street Journal. He has served as general co-chair of AAAI HCOMP, papers co-chair of ACM Creativity & Cognition, and program co-chair of ACM Collective Intelligence.

Previously, Dr. Luther was a postdoctoral fellow in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in human-centered computing from Georgia Tech, where he was a James D. Foley Scholar. He received his B.S. in computer graphics technology, with honors and highest distinction, from Purdue University. He also interned at IBM Research, Microsoft Research, and YouTube/Google.