Kurt Luther

Kurt Luther’s research interests include crowdsourcing, social computing, human-AI collaboration, human computation, and creativity support tools. He has served as principal or co-principal investigator for more than $2 million in federal funding from the NSF, the NIH, the NEH, and the National Archives.

Luther is also an assistant professor (by courtesy) in the Department of History.

His research group, the Crowd Intelligence Lab, builds and studies crowdsourcing systems that support creativity and discovery, with applications in domains such as journalism, national security, and history. 

In 2017, Luther was honored with the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. Additional honors include the Virginia Tech College of Engineering Outstanding New Assistant Professor Award and the Purdue Polytechnic Institute Outstanding Technology Alumni Award in 2019. 

Awards for his papers include the ACM CSCW Best Paper Award in 2013; the AAAI HCOMP Notable Paper Award in 2017; and the ACM IUI Best Paper Award in 2019. His software won the Microsoft Cloud AI Research Challenge Grand Prize in 2018; and the AAAI HCOMP Best Demo Award, both in 2018 and 2019. 

Luther's work has appeared in The Atlantic, CNN, Harvard Business Review, NPR, Slate, Smithsonian, and TIME.

He served as program co-chair for ACM Collective Intelligence 2018 and papers co-chair for ACM Creativity and Cognition 2019. 

Luther received his Ph.D. in human-centered computing from Georgia Tech, where he was a James D. Foley Scholar, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer graphics technology, with honors and highest distinction, from Purdue University. While a student, he completed internships at IBM Research, Microsoft Research, and YouTube/Google.