Seminar: Crowd Sleuths: Solving Mysteries with Crowds, Experts, and AI

Abstract

The rise of crowdsourced investigations has transformed society. These investigations, coordinate over the Internet by amateurs with diverse knowledge and experience, have achieved major successes, helping to find missing persons, solve crimes, debunk misinformation, and correct the historical record. However, lacking expertise and oversight, crowdsourced investigations have also devolved into digital vigilantism, resulting in misidentifications and harassment. Over the past decade, my research group, the Crowd Intelligence Lab, has explored how collaboration with experts and AI can enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, and ethics of crowdsourced investigations. In one line of research, we explore how novel human-AI interaction interfaces and workflows can combine the complementary strengths of human crowds and AI-based computer vision and facial recognition to identify unknown people in historical photos. In a second line of research, we focus on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) investigations, which rely entirely on publicly available information. We study successful examples of crowdsourced OSINT "in the wild" and apply those lessons to design new platforms that help novice crowds work together and alongside experts on real-world investigations.

_Biography

Dr. Kurt Luther is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He is also the associate director for research in the Center for Human-Computer Interaction, faculty co-lead for the Open-Source Intelligence Lab, and a faculty affiliate of the Department of History and National Security Institute. His research interests include crowdsourcing, social computing, and human-AI collaboration. He currently serves as steering committee co-chair for the AAAI Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) conference and associate editor of the journal ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems. He is a member of AAAI and a senior member of ACM.

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. 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 three HCOMP Best Demo Awards. 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 and his B.S. in computer graphics technology from Purdue University. He also interned at IBM Research, Microsoft Research, and YouTube/Google.  Website: https://crowd.cs.vt.edu/kurt-luther/