Kurt Luther

Social computing Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Tech

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About

I am a Ph.D. candidate specializing in social computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. My advisor is Professor Amy Bruckman, a faculty member in the School of Interactive Computing.

I design and study social computing systems that support creative collaboration. For my dissertation work, I investigated leadership in online, collaborative movie and game production, and led the development of Pipeline, free, open-source software for crowdsourcing creative projects. This research was supported by a CreativeIT grant from the National Science Foundation. Previously, I was a co-creator of Who Gives a Tweet?, a tool for rating Twitter updates that was covered by The Atlantic, TIME, CNN, and Mashable. I also led the development of ProveIt, a reference management tool now part of the English-language Wikipedia.

In 2011, I was named a Foley Scholar. This is the GVU Center at Georgia Tech's highest honor, awarded for “overall brilliance and potential impact.”

In recent summers, I interned at Google/YouTube (2010), Newgrounds.com (2009), and the Social Computing groups at Microsoft Research (2008) and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (2007).

I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I studied computer graphics, art, and design at Purdue University, where I also served as president of the student chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH and co-founded the Purdue filmmaking club.