Tech on Tap: The Civil War Photo Sleuth Project with Kurt Luther
Thursday, April 24 at 6 p.m.
Academic Building One
3625 Potomac Ave., Alexandria, VA 22305
Registration is $10 and includes two drink tickets, appetizers, and a $5 gift to the Center for Human-Computer Interaction.
Join Kurt Luther, associate professor of history and computer science at Virginia Tech, as he presents research on developing technologies rediscovering the lost names and stories behind historical photos.
The project, Civil War Photo Sleuth, uses crowdsourcing and AI to identify unknown soldiers in American Civil War-era photos. The project now has a reference database of over 60,000 photos, the majority contributed by the user community, and Luther's team has identified photos in public collections including the Library of Congress, National Archives, and National Portrait Gallery. The team's work has been featured on The History Channel and in publications such as TIME and Smithsonian Magazine.
Luther and his former Ph.D. advisee, Vikram Mohanty, also co-founded a non-profit, The Photo Sleuth Foundation, with the mission of helping historians, museum professionals, genealogists, and collectors solve mysteries involving their historical photos.
Contact
For more information about this event, contact Tricia Realbuto at trealbuto@vt.edu.
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