Kurt Luther

Kurt Luther

Affiliated Faculty and Senior Advisor for OSINT

Dr. Kurt Luther is an associate professor of computer science and College of Engineering faculty fellow at Virginia Tech and a founding faculty member of the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus near Washington, D.C. He is also the associate director for research in the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and affiliated faculty of the National Security Institute and Department of History. Dr. Luther directs Virginia Tech’s Crowd Intelligence Lab, where his team researches the complementary strengths of crowdsourced human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) in domains like journalism, history, and national security. The lab’s current projects focus on improving open source intelligence (OSINT) analysis, combating disinformation and misinformation, identifying unknown people and places in historical and modern photos, and understanding real-world crowdsourced investigations.

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.