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Kurt Luther

Kurt Luther Headshot

Current University
Virginia Tech

Research Focus
Crowd computing and human-AI interaction, with applications to national security, journalism, and history

Background
Kurt Luther is an associate professor of computer science and College of Engineering faculty fellow at Virginia Tech and an adjunct professor of computer and information sciences at Virginia Military Institute. He is also a faculty affiliate of Virginia Tech’s Department of History, Center for Human-Computer Interaction, and Hume Center for National Security and Technology. 

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 Polytechnic Institute 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 also completed internships at IBM Research, Microsoft Research, and YouTube/Google.

He has 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.

Alma Mater
Luther was a postdoctoral fellow in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech and a B.S. in Computer Graphics Technology from Purdue University.