Kurt Luther

Kurt Luther is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, a founding faculty member at the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus, and director of the Crowd Intelligence Lab. He holds roles as associate director for research in the Center for Human-Computer Interaction, faculty affiliate of the National Security Institute and Department of History, and adjunct professor at Virginia Military Institute. His research focuses on human-AI collaboration, crowdsourcing, and digital humanities, with applications in historical photo identification and open-source intelligence.

Education: Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing (Georgia Tech, 2012); B.S. in Computer Graphics Technology (Purdue University, 2006). Postdoctoral work at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

Research interests include crowdsourcing methodologies, social computing, and leveraging AI for historical investigations. His work on Civil War Photo Sleuth combines facial recognition and community expertise to identify historical portraits. Awards include the NSF CAREER Award and multiple best paper awards from ACM and AAAI conferences.

Grants: Funded by agencies including CCI, DoD, Google, NEH, and NIH. Projects include AI-augmented OSINT investigations and collaborative workflows for misinformation analysis.

Labs and teams: Director of Crowd Intelligence Lab, co-lead of Open-Source Intelligence Lab, and core faculty at Institute for Advanced Computing. Conducts research on human-AI systems for vulnerability assessment and cultural heritage preservation.

Publications span CHI, CSCW, HCOMP conferences. Serves as papers co-chair for ACM CSCW 2024 and steering committee co-chair for HCOMP. Editor for ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.