Lab Director
Dr. Kurt Luther
Dr. Kurt Luther is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and a founding core faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Computing at Virginia Tech. He is also the associate director for research in the Center for Human–Computer Interaction, director of the Crowd Intelligence Lab, and faculty co-lead for the Open-Source Intelligence Lab. His research interests include human–computer interaction (HCI), human–AI collaboration, crowdsourcing, and social computing.
Dr. Luther currently serves as steering committee co-chair for the ACM Human–AI Complementarity and Alignment (HCOMP) conference series and associate editor of the journals ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) and Proceedings of the ACM on Human–Computer Interaction (PACM HCI). He is an ACM Distinguished Member.
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. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and received the CSCW Best Paper Award, the HCOMP Notable Paper Award, and the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) Best Paper Award. His software has won the Microsoft Cloud AI Research Challenge Grand Prize and several HCOMP Best Demo Awards. He has secured research funding from sponsors such as CCI, DoD, NEH, NHPRC, NIH, and NSF. His research has been featured by The Atlantic, The History Channel, NPR, Smithsonian, TIME, and The Wall Street Journal. He has served as general co-chair of ACM HCOMP and ACM Collective Intelligence, and papers co-chair of ACM CSCW and ACM Creativity & Cognition.
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.
Outside of academia, Dr. Luther is the founding president of The Photo Sleuth Foundation, senior editor and columnist for Military Images magazine, and a Virginia Defense Force staff officer. He is a member of the Military Cyber Professionals Association (MCPA) and the Military Writers Guild.