I’m a Ph.D. candidate in social computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I research how technologies can support new forms of creative collaboration in online communities as diverse as Wikipedia, Newgrounds, Second Life and Flickr.
At Georgia Tech, I’m affiliated with the College of Computing, School of Interactive Computing, GVU Center, ELC Lab, ADAM Lab, Human-Centered Computing program and Web Science initiative. My advisor is Prof. Amy Bruckman.
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.
Most of my projects involve some combination of my research interests in social computing, online communities, and creative collaboration:
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 how we can better support them with technology.
We’re working with several local theaters to study how improvisers think, how we can model it, and what the implications may be for understanding human creativity and improving artificial intelligence.
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.
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.
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.
We interviewed people who remix and mash up videos in online communities like Yahoo!'s Jumpcut to understand how their views on authorship and the technology of video remixing websites affected their creative practices.
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.
We built and evaluated RevisiTour, a system built on the Flickr API that lets tourists visualize their path through the Georgia Aquarium, synchronize the photos they took with the exhibits they visited, and share their experience with others.
Some of my recent publications include:
When possible, I enjoy volunteering at the academic conferences I attend:
Feel free to contact me:
Kurt Luther
Technology Square Research Building
85 5th Street NW
Atlanta, Georgia 30332 USA
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All content copyright © 2009 Kurt Luther.