Kurt Luther

About Kurt

I’m a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. My advisor is Prof. Amy Bruckman.

I do research in the areas of social computing and creativity. My dissertation work is supported by a CreativeIT grant from the National Science Foundation.

I recently interned with Microsoft Research and IBM Research in their Social Computing groups. Previously, I studied computer graphics, art and design at Purdue University. I also helped run two movie theaters — one online, one brick-and-mortar.

Affiliations

Travel

Research Projects

My current and past research projects include:

Leadership & Collaboration in Online Animation Communities

We’re studying how people meet up and work together in online communities like Newgrounds to produce animated movies and games, focusing on the challenges for leaders and the role of technological support.

Digital Improvisation

We’re working with local theater companies to study how improvisers think, how we can model it, and what the implications may be for understanding human creativity and improving artificial intelligence.

Specialized Tools for Wikipedia Editors

We’re building ProveIt, an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser that helps improve the reliability of Wikipedia articles by making it easier for people to add and edit references to source materials.

Online Collaboration for Citizen Scientists

We built and evaluated Pathfinder, an online environment where citizen scientists can explore, discuss, and analyze the data they collect using lightweight tools for structured argumentation.

Serious Games for Audio Transcription

We built and evaluated an online puzzle game called Audio Puzzler that produces highly accurate, time-stamped transcriptions of audio files as a byproduct of play.

Authorship in Online Video Remixing Communities

We interviewed people who remix and mash up videos in Yahoo!'s Jumpcut online community to understand how their views on authorship and the technology of video remixing websites affected their creative practices.

Serious Games for Virtual Team Building

We built and evaluated three collaborative games in the 3D virtual world Second Life to see if members of real-world virtual teams who played them together experienced greater trust and group cohesion.

User-Generated Content & Tourism

We built and evaluated RevisiTour, a Flickr API-based system that allows tourists to visualize their path through the Georgia Aquarium, synchronize the photos they took with the exhibits they visited, and share their experience with others.

Publications

Some highlights from my recent publications and other writings include:

Conference Papers

Research Videos

Research Posters

Research Demonstrations

Doctoral Colloquia

Workshops Co-Organized

Workshop & Position Papers

Technical Reports

Teaching Experience

For the Spring 2009 semester, I was the GTA for Design of Online Communities (CS 6470), a graduate-level computer science course at Georgia Tech taught by Prof. Amy Bruckman. I also guest-lectured on leadership and online collaboration for this course.

In Fall 2008, I guest-lectured on non-experimental research methods for an undergraduate-level psychology course at Georgia Tech.

Service

I enjoy helping out “behind-the-scenes” at various academic conferences:

I also volunteer at Dad’s Garage Theatre Company.

Curriculum Vitæ

My six-page vitæ can be downloaded as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. PDF Icon

Contact Info

Feel free to contact me:

Email Address

Email me

Mailing Address

Kurt Luther
Technology Square Research Building
Room 338A
85 Fifth Street NW
Atlanta, Georgia 30332 USA

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Online Profiles

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