All right. So today we're interviewing Dr Luther for
the CS Seminar Capstone Project. So Good afternoon
Dr Luther. Good afternoon. All right,
So the first question is, please just give us
a brief overview of who you are and what you
do here at Virginia Tech and as well as some
background information such as undergrad and graduate schools attended.
So my name is Kurt Luther. I'm a new
assistant professor in computer science here at Virginia Tech.
I'm also a member of the Center for Human Computer
Interaction and human computer Interaction is my focus area.
The area. I do my research. Um,
I got my PhD at Georgia Tech in 2012 where
I got my PhD in human centered computing. And
before that, I got my undergraduate degree at Purdue
University, where I studied computer graphics and art and
design. I also did a post doc between my
PhD and starting here at Virginia Tech. And I
did that post doc at Carnegie Mellon University in their
human computer interaction institute. AwSome. Okay, So
before we get started asking you about your current research
, can you just go over real quick some
of your current hobbies or interests outside of computer science?
Yeah, sure. So, uh, I
like history a lot. Enjoy doing historical things,
Like going on tours and, uh, checking out
battlefields and historic sites. Um, I like visiting
national parks and hiking and camping. I am trying
to visit every unit of the national park system,
and there's over 400 of them now, so it's
gonna be a lifelong project. Although I'm doing okay.
I got I don't know, 50 or so
so far. Ah, I enjoy good food.
I love checking out restaurants and, uh, trying
out new kinds of cuisine. Uh, and I
have a dog, and I like hanging with my
dog. AwSome. Okay, now, so what
is your research that you are currently working on?
Also, I'm actually working on a on a whole
lot of different research projects. Uh, so the
focus of my research is social computing and crowdsourcing,
and in particular, I'm interested in how we can
use social computing and social technologies to support creativity and
actually help people be creative, help people discover new
things. So this, uh, this general idea
plays out in a few different projects that I have
going on right now. My area of interest in
research is crowd sourcing and social computing, and,
uh, really excited about the possibilities of people from
around the world with different kinds of interests in different
skills and experiences coming together and the Internet actually connecting
These people to do exciting things to create new
kinds of artworks or help solve scientific problems or historical
mysteries or make new kinds of discoveries. And I'm
really excited about how computing and in particular social technologies
like the Internet can help make that possible. All
right. Next question is what piqued your interest
into pursuing a career in human computer interaction. So
I started college planning to be, uh, I
started college with plans to work in the entertainment industry
in the visual effects or the animation industry working on
movies and things like that. And, uh,
I did that for a number of years and for
my senior project, I did some research where I
was actually building tools to support animators, and I
found that actually helping other kinds of creative people be more
creative and to do the things that they want to
do was even more exciting than actually being that artists
or that animator for me. So I caught the research
bug and in, uh, college and in graduate
school. I studied human centered computing to try to
understand what it means to actually, uh, design
technologies to support creativity to help people be more creative.
And what are the different challenges involved there?
What are the interesting possibilities? So growing up
? I was really interested in making movies and even
adding special effects to movies like three D animations,
uh, for spaceships and and, you know,
Star Wars, lightsaber battles and things like that.
And the problem was, I didn't know anybody around
me in high school who really knew much about that
stuff. So I went online and, uh,
my family had just gotten in America Online account and
found these online communities in these forums where people were
talking about all kinds of filmmaking stuff, how to
do different kinds of technologies, how to use different
kinds of technologies how to make three D animations to
use green screens and all this kind of stuff.
And I was just hooked, and I was really
amazed by the ability of the Internet to help me
learn these technologies things that I would have never been
able to learn Where I waas um, in my
town and I was able to not only learn these
technologies, but I was also able to find other
people who were interested in working together with me.
And so ever since then, I've just been fascinated
by the idea of technology supporting, collaboration, supporting
creativity, helping people to do more complex, uh
, interesting creative things than they would be without that
technological support without that social support. All right,
next question is, can you please go over some
of the software that you've helped develop, like crowd
creator pipeline? And also is there any other
software that you are currently working on that you could
tell us about So Pipeline was my dissertation research at
Georgia Tech. And the idea was a lot of
people who organized projects online where they have collaborators who
may be living in different places. Um, the
leaders of these projects are really overburdened. They just
have way too much to do organizing these projects,
coordinating these people who aren't physically in the same places
them it could be really overwhelming. So we developed
this software called Pipeline to try to make that leaders
job easier and try to make it a little less
overwhelming. So these leaders can use the pipeline software
actually redistribute some of their leadership responsibilities. They can
do this, too, by delegating work to their
collaborators, other people in the project or even the
software itself can assume some of these leadership behaviors.
And we studied how people use pipeline in the context
of animated movie and game production. So, um
, people who wanted to make animated movies or games
and would organize themselves online could use pipeline. And
we found through different studies of pipeline users that the
system actually helped people doom or complex, more ambitious
kinds of projects. One group of artists, 30
or so artists from many different countries around the world
came together and for I think, like six weeks
, put together this amazing interactive art gallery to celebrate
thing coming of Christmas. And they said that what
they actually came up with was, ah, lot
more ambitious and complex than anything they would have attempted
before. Pipeline. The software has been used for
other kinds of cool things, too, like it's
been used for, ah, global scavenger hunt.
It's been used to support game jams where teams come
together, uh, to make a game in just
a few days. And people on the team's artists
and programmers and musicians may not have ever met each
other before then, and pipeline held to facilitate those
collaborations. Another product that worked on his crowd,
crit and crowd crit, is a crowd sourcing system
to provide high quality feedback to designers. So a
lot of us do design. Um, I would
say everyday design things like making, ah, poster
for an event or a flyer or a slide deck
for presentation. And, uh, since we're not
trained as designers, those designs aren't as effective as
we'd like them to be on. One of the
problems is we don't have access to, ah,
good source of feedback. We may not know a
lot of designers or if we do know someone,
and we asked them for some feedback. Uh,
sure, they'll help us out a few times,
but we can't just keep asking them again and again
. So the idea was that maybe we could take
advantage of crowd sourcing the idea that there are lots
of people online, uh, from around the world
who are interested in helping out, uh, to
provide this feedback. And so crowd crit allows the
designer to, um, take a work in progress
and upload it to this system and crowd Workers from
all around the world will look at this work in
progress and use our special interface to provide critique feedback
on what the different strengths and weaknesses of the design
are. And even if those crowd workers aren't design
experts are interface provides structure to help them provide useful
feedback. And after that feedback comes in, we
also have an interactive visualization to present that critique back
to the designer to help them sort through. Could
be 50 or 75 100 different individual comments to figure
out what are the most important issues. What are
the priorities for what that designer wants to to invest
their time and their effort with So. After building
crowd create, we ran a number of different evaluation
to see if it actually works. If it actually
helps people make better designs. Uh, we organized
a couple of design contests where we actually had people
come in to our lab and uh, use crowd
create as part of their design process. And then
we could compare how people who received crowd crit feedback
performed compared to people who didn't get crowd crit feedback
on. We found that designers who got crowd great
feedback actually felt like, um, they had made
more changes, that they had made better designs,
that they had noticed more issues than people who just
got general feedback. So, another project that I
have a new project that I've just started is thinking
about how crowd sourcing can help people solve historical mysteries
. And so the idea here is that there are
a lot of really small kind of micro mysteries out
there. That may not be big enough for a
professional historian, a professional scholar to spend a lot
of time trying to solve. But they might interest
ordinary people who have an interest in history. Uh
, and if enough of these people can solve these
micro mysteries, maybe because it's fun or because the
topic interest them. The results of those many discoveries
can aggregate up into bigger discoveries that may be of
interest to professional historians or scholars who can use this
information to ask and provide answers to really big questions
. So we're experimenting with different ways of using the
crowd to provide assistance to a researcher, uh,
in real time. The idea is that as a
historian or as a scholar, you're trying to understand
, for example, what's going on in a historical
picture and you're doing your research and the crowd is
helping you in real time in parallel. So you're
maybe suggesting or delegating some tasks to the crowd.
And the crowd is going off onto the Web searching
for finding and finding different answers and bringing that information
back to you as the researcher to help you do
the job. You're already doing a little bit better
or a little bit faster or allowing you to,
um, make discoveries you wouldn't been able to without
that assistance. Alright, so looking at your previous
publications, research publications, let me start whatever right
, so looking at your previous research publications, you've
done ah lot of work with crowdsourcing. Do you
think that crowdsourcing has an important future with the way
that new software is developed or tested, or do
you see it as a stepping stone for something bigger
? I think crowdsourcing is really exciting. I think
in some ways it can represent what the future of
work in general might look like. We know that
work is is increasingly decentralized, distributed across workplaces across
states, across entire countries. People are increasingly doing more
temporary work. People are doing more freelance kinds of
work and crowd sourcing represents maybe a baseline for what
work could look like in general in the future.
This idea that, uh, no matter what your
interests are, what your skills are, you can
go online and find some kind of work that interests
you and that you have time for and that you're
interested in doing. And then, uh, as
you build up your skills or you develop, um,
other interests or more expertise, you can continue
to find interesting tasks, interesting challenges that allow you
to develop your interest and skills on. There's a
nice match between what you are interested in doing and
what kind of work is out there and is available
for you. One of our challenges as researchers is
trying to figure out how to make crowd sourcing and
crowd work, um, more fair and more enjoyable
and, uh, how to provide a better match
between what people are looking to do and what work
opportunities are available. There's still a lot of work
to do there, but I think it's really exciting
work. So One thing I think is really cool
about crowd sourcing is it allows people to build up
expertise with something that they might have any experience with
before so they can start out doing a very
simple task that pretty much anyone has the ability to
do. And as they gain experience and they learn
more about this area of this domain, they can
do more complex kinds of work. And throughout this
whole process, uh, their work and the
kinds of task that they take on are totally guided
by their own interests. No one's forcing them to
do any of this stuff unless they want to
Oh, there's a really nice marriage. If
this is done right between what people wanna learn and
what kind of work they want to do and what
kind of work needs to be done out there in
the world, I think it's really exciting that there
are a lot of people out there that may not
feel like they have the expertise to do a really
complex project, like build a piece of software or
write an encyclopedia article or create an artwork. But
crowdsourcing allows them to bite off a little piece of
that and get their feet wet, learn kind of
the basics and still make a contribution. And not
only is that contribution valuable in itself, but they're
learning and their getting exposed to other people with a
little bit more experience. And so ultimately they might
build up that confidence in that expertise to be,
um, really creative. So what has drawn you
to the creative computing side of computer science as a
whole? And you, do you see yourself doing
anything with it in the future? So I think
that there's something really exciting about the way that technology
can support. Creativity is actually how I got interested
in technology because I was interested in things like filmmaking
and visual effects, and, uh, computers and
software allowed me to really develop those skills and explore
new possibilities. So. Ever since then, I've
been really interested in ways that technology can support creativity
. I think there's some really powerful things about the
way that the Internet and social software brings people together
and allows them to share ideas, to brainstorm together
, to give each other feedback, um, to
divide up work and combined efforts of people with very
different skill sets. You know, collaborative teams of
people with different skills have been working together for very
long time. But the Internet I think catalyzes
that by bringing together many more people and making it
easier for them to find each other.
I think there's something really special about the ways
that social computing in particular can support creativity. So
that's an area of research that I'm continuing to pursue,
is looking at that intersection between social
computing and creativity and discovery? Um, I think
there's still a lot of interesting work left to be
done. So right, so throughout your graduate and
postgraduate level research, do you have any cooler need
stories of someone you've met or something you've
been able to do that you wouldn't have gotten the
opportunity to do otherwise? One of the reasons I
really like HCI - human computer interaction - is that in
this field you get to work with users all the
time. And that often means that you get to
work with some really interesting people. For example,
in my dissertation research, I was building this pipeline
collaboration system to support leaders of collaborative projects. And
a lot of these projects were organized by really talented
artists and game developers just really creative people. And
there was a real privilege to be able to try
to support their efforts and the new ideas that they
wanted to attempt as the folks building the software that
they were using to collaborate. So I'd say one
of the really fun things about HCI
is that you get to work really closely with
users who can be, uh, really impressive and
really inspire you with their creativity and the kinds of
cool things that they want to be able to do.
A lot of times as software developers or designers,
we make these systems, and we have this expectation
of how they're going to be used, and more
often than not, how users actually adopt the systems
turns out to be pretty different, and a lot
of the times I find it, it's really impressive.
They really go beyond anything that you could have
imagined, and they use it in cool and surprising
ways that really challenged your own expectations. One of
the cool things about being a a graduate student in
computing or HCI is that you have the opportunity to
do some really cool internships. And I've done some
really interesting internships I've worked at at Microsoft and at
YouTube, at IBM and at Newgrounds, which
is a Flash animators community. And in
all of those experiences, I got to meet really
fantastic people, just brilliant researchers, amazing software developers,
really talented artists, and it felt like a
real... it was really eye opening to see all
the cool stuff that was going on there. In my
work supporting animators, I often attended a big conference
called SIGGRAPH for computer graphics, and one year I
was a student volunteer at this conference, and the
keynote speaker was none other than George Lucas So the
coolest part of that was when George Lucas and his
entourage needed to have lunch. After the keynote speech,
they went to a little room in the conference
center, and that happened to be the room that
I was in charge of hanging out in. So
I got to hang out with George Lucas and his
crew as they ate lunch. All right, so
what do you think are some of the up and
coming research topics in your field in alongside that?
What do you actually looking? What are you looking
forward to do in your own field of research?
So in the field of crowd sourcing and social computing
there are few pretty exciting trends that that seem
to be cropping up. One of them is thinking
about how we can help crowd workers do more and
more complex creative kinds of work. Historically, crowdsourcing
has been, ah, lot of really small tasks
done independently, things like transcribing somebody's business card.
But as these tools become more powerful and these platforms
attract more and more users, we're realizing that we
can use crowd workers to do much more interesting,
complex and creative kinds of work. So, for
example, how might we use ah crowd of non
experts to write a news article or to make a
scientific discovery or to help put together a creative work
of art? And, uh, some of my
own research explores those same questions how we can make
crowd sourcing platforms a place where very interesting,
fun, complex and creative work gets done.
Another interesting trend in crowd sourcing and social computing is
the idea of combining online crowdsourcing with offline crowds.
And it turns out that, uh, as much
interesting work as there is going on, um,
on the Internet, there's also some pretty cool stuff
happening in the physical world. There are crowd platforms
like TaskRabbit, where you can actually hire crowd
workers to do, uh, work for you in
the physical world, things like, uh, doing
your laundry or building your Ikea furniture or, uh,
doing some grocery shopping for you and all those -
those might seem like pretty mundane tasks. It really
, uh, raises these broader questions of what would
it mean to build systems where people can do work
both online and in the physical world, and combine
those efforts to do something even more complex and more
interesting than what's currently possible? There's already so many
interesting things that happen online with crowdsourcing, Uh,
and when you open up the possibility of some of
those workers doing things in the physical world, possibilities
air pretty much endless. Right? So are there
any classes that you would recommend for undergrads to take
that are looking to do research in the same field
as yours? And also, are there any classes
that you teach or have taken that you would also
highly recommend? So if you're an undergrad in computer
science, I would really recommend that you consider the
HCI oriented classes that you can take
One of them is the introduction to human
computer interaction course, where you really get to understand
what it means to focus on users and think about
user needs first and foremost, when you're developing software
on different methods and techniques for doing that effectively,
the course helps people learn how to build interactive
systems. And these are systems, where you can't predict
how they're going to be used because people are unpredictable.
And so that requires an entirely new approach to
developing software which that class really helps to highlight and
give you experience with So. Another really cool undergrad
class is creative computing, where you can actually work
in kind of ah, studio environment, um,
collaborating with people who might actually even be indifferent areas
other than CS, for example, visual arts students
and work together on fantastic creative group projects like making
games or other kinds of really exciting, innovative,
interdisciplinary projects. Um, I definitely have to recommend
the capstone as as one of the most fun and
exciting classes you could take as a CS major.
It's a semester long group project where you can either
, um, work on a project suggested by a
client or even suggest your own project. And,
uh, as a group, you can do this
kind of semester long, really fun, exciting project
taking advantage of the culmination of your HCI skills
and experiences as a student here and often times it
pays off with a really cool result. I also
teach a graduate course on called User Interface software,
and the focus recently has been on Web development and
design techniques. So how can we build systems that
are out there on the Web that work on people's
laptops but also on their phones, how we can
connect the websites or the online web applications that we've
created two other sources of information out there? Uh
, next semester, I'm teaching a graduate seminar on
crowd sourcing and human computation, so we're really going
to take seriously this question of, uh, when
do we want human intelligence to solve a problem?
And when do we want computation or automated techniques to
solve a problem? And when can we combine those
two, uh, to solve even harder problems that
neither one human intelligence or just computation alone could solve
by themselves? All right, So do you have
any recommendations for any outside learning tools for currenct
students, either undergrad or graduate? So I recently
finished one of the best computer science books I've ever
read. Maybe one of the best books I've ever
read in general, which is the Innovators by Walter
Isaacson. And it's basically a history of computing told
through, uh, all the different inventions from the
earliest days of the field, uh, hundreds of
years ago, all the way up through modern timesn
. And it's also told as a as a series
of biographies of pioneers, key people who had important
discoveries that led us through the history of computing to
where we are now. And I just love this
book because first of all, it reminds us of
how long the history of computing actually is and the
fact that this field has been around for a long
time and has had has been influenced by a lot
of different people. I also really like it because
it shows that the history of computing is is a
is a history of people. It's a human history.
It's about, you know, creative, interesting
people who had great ideas but also had conflicts with
each other with other things going on in human history
, like wars and, uh and other, you
know, important historical events and how those things influence
technology and technology and computing progress is really fascinating.
Um, the book also shows how the history of
computing is incredibly collaborative. It's always been people building
on the ideas of others, discussing ideas with colleagues
, being inspired by others in the field. It's
never been this lone genius, um, sitting in
an office coming up with brilliant insights. History of
computing is really collaborative and creative, and this book
helps to reveal that. Do you have any advice
in your current undergrad or graduate students with their studies ?
One suggestion I have for current students is try
to connect your study of computer science with some other
field, some other body of knowledge. Uh,
that will position you to have, uh, unique
insight and unique technical expertise to contribute to that other
field. Computer science, by itself is really interesting.
But once you take that body of knowledge and
you apply it to some other area, uh,
then I think things get super interesting. So,
for example, there's so many interesting things happening at
the intersection of computer science and art, uh,
computer science and, uh, history, the humanities
, English. There's really amazing potential at the intersection
of technology and expression. People who are really talented
at finding ways to, um, describe human experiences
to convey the human condition and technology, more and
more is providing new opportunities for these people to express
themselves. Uh, there's ah really amazing opportunity for
computing and artistic fields.
I think there's a fantastic opportunity for
computer science and, uh, feels like art designed
to complement each other and to produce new kinds of
creative products and new ideas that really take advantage of
the unique strengths of both. So the last question
is for any students that are interested in doing researche
with you either as an undergrad or for their PhD.
.How should they get in contact with you?
I'm always looking to work with excited, passionate students
who are interested in things like crowd sourcing or social
computing or technologies that support creativity. And, uh
, the best way to get in touch with me
is to Shoot me an email. My email address
is Kurt Luther? Um no, it isn't!
I should probably know that. Um, the
best way to get in touch with me is to
Shoot me an email or stop by my office during
my office hours. I'd be really excited to talk
to you. My email address is K. Luther
at VT dot edu. Or you can
check out my website with more information about me and
some of the projects that I have going on right
now. And my website is my name, kurtluther.com.
Awesome. Thank you. Thank 529 00:31:03.450 --> A:middle L:90% you.