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Speaker: Kurt Luther, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech
Time: 12:30 – 1:30pm
Room: Gates-Hillman Complex 6501
Abstract:
Despite the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, images often need context to be meaningful to their viewers. In this talk, I show how expert-led crowdsourcing, a novel approach that combines the relative strengths of experts and amateur crowds, can be used to solve photo mysteries. In one example, I conducted a qualitative study of image verification experts in journalism, national security, and human rights organizations to understand how they perform geolocation, the process of mapping the precise location where a photo or video was taken. This research informed the design of GroundTruth, a system where experts collaborate with crowds to geolocate unknown images. In another example, I partnered with a historical photography magazine to develop Civil War Photo Sleuth, a system that leverages crowdsourcing and computer vision techniques to help experts identify unknown soldier portraits from the 19th century. I also discuss broader challenges and opportunities in crowdsourced investigations, open-source intelligence, and collaborative sensemaking illustrated by these examples.
Bio:
Kurt Luther is an assistant professor of computer science at Virginia Tech, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Human-Computer Interaction, the Department of History, and the Hume Center for National Security and Technology. He directs the Crowd Intelligence Lab (http://crowd.cs.vt.edu), an interdisciplinary research group exploring how crowdsourcing systems can support creativity and discovery. He is principal investigator for over $1.5M in sponsored research, including an NSF CAREER Award. Previously, Dr. Luther was a postdoctoral fellow in the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in human-centered computing from Georgia Tech, where he was a Foley Scholar, and his B.S. in computer graphics technology from Purdue University. He has also worked at IBM Research, Microsoft Research, and YouTube/Google.
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