Dr. Kurt Luther is an associate professor of computer science and College of Engineering faculty fellow at Virginia Tech and a founding faculty member of the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus near Washington, D.C. He is also the associate director for research in the Center for Human-Computer Interaction, a faculty affiliate of the National Security Institute and Department of History, and an adjunct professor at Virginia Military Institute. His research interests include crowdsourcing, social computing, and human-AI collaboration.
Dr. Luther directs Virginia Tech’s Crowd Intelligence Lab. His team researches the complementary strengths of crowdsourced human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) in domains like journalism, history, and national security. The lab’s current projects focus on improving open source intelligence (OSINT) 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 Virginia Tech College of Engineering Outstanding New Assistant Professor Award, and the Purdue University Outstanding Technology Alumni Award. 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 two 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, and TIME. He served as general co-chair of AAAI HCOMP 2021, papers co-chair of ACM Creativity & Cognition 2019, and program co-chair of ACM Collective Intelligence 2018. He is a member of AAAI and a senior member of ACM.
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.