BYU CS Feature Stories

Server Maintenance

Computer Science Department — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:48:47 -0600

The website will be down today (July 17th) from 5:00 pm to 5:15 pm. We are performing server maintenance. Thank you for your patience.

New CS Course: CS 401R sec 1 Fundamentals of Information Retrieval

Computer Science Department — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:43:02 -0600

The Computer Science Department is pleased to announce the new CS 401R course that will be offered winter semesters. This course, titled Fundamentals of Information Retrieval will be taught by Dennis Ng winter semester 2010 on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3-4:15 p.m.

Course:            401R sec 1
Course Title:    Fundamentals of Information Retrieval
Time:               Tuesdays and Thursdays 3-4:15pm Winter 2010
Instructor:        Dennis Ng
Credits:            3
Textbook:         Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice

Course Objectives
·      To learn the concepts and terminology of information retrieval (IR) systems.
·      To study the design methodologies and design issues of IR systems.
·      To understand the fundamental IR models, which include the Boolean, Vector Space, Probabilistic models, and evaluation strategies of IR systems
·      To examine various query processing and refinement techniques
·      To survey various topics related to IR systems, including classification and clustering, social search, relevance feedback, ranking, indexing, etc.

CS Technical Career Fair Preview

Computer Science Department — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:16:20 -0600

Do not miss the opportunity to meet personally with representatives from across the spectrum of the computer science industry. You can plan for your future, learn more about the opportunities awaiting you after graduation, begin the process of networking and making contacts in the industry, and grab a doughnut...all without leaving the Talmage Building! The Career Fair Preview will be Tuesday, October 6 at 12 noon in 1170 TMCB. Companies attending: Avalanche Disney Interactive Studios, LDS Church Department of Information and Communication, and National Instruments. For more information, contact the CS Department at csoffice@cs.byu.edu.

The BYU Technical Career Fair will be in the Wilkinson Student Center on October 7 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. All Computer Science students, as well as other technical majors, are invited to attend.

As of September 15, the following companies are attending the Technical Career Fair: Aero Vironment Inc.; AMC Logistics Leadership Center; Apple, Inc.; Applied Sinal; Avalanche Disney Interactive Studios; Batten & Shaw, Inc.; BD Medical, Bechtel Mrine propulsion Corp.; Celanese; Centex Homes, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Department of Informtion and Communication; Clearwater Analytics; Dannon Company; Dow Chemical; Dresser; Electrical Consultants, Inc.; ExxonMobil; Fairchild Semiconductor; Fast Enterprises; FBI Federal Highway Administration; First Quality Information; FM Global; GE Energy; Goldman Sachs & Co.; Geneva Rock Products; Gore; Graymont; Harder Mechanical Contractos, Inc.; Hewlett-Packard Company; Hill AFB; Hilton Hotels; Horrocks Engineers, Inc.; IM Flash; J-U-B Engineers, Inc.; Kiewitt; L-3 Communications; Lawrence Livermore National; Laboratory; Layton Construction; Lockheed Martin; MasterControl; McCarthy Buildin Companies, Inc.; Michael Baker Jr., Inc.; Microsoft Corporation; MIT Lincoln Labs; Moxtek, Inc.; National Instruments; NAVAIR; Naval Reactors Facility, Bettis Lab; Neovest; Nicholson construction Co.; Northrop Grumman Corp.; National Security Agency; Omniture; On Semiconductors; Parived Solutions; Parsons Brinkerhoff; Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne; Procter & Gamble; Puget Sound Navel Shipyard; Raytheon; Rincon Research Corp.; Rio Tinto; Sirsidynix; Solstice Enterprise Softwre, Inc.; Southwest Gas Corportion; Stryker Endoscopy; Union Telephone/Union Wireless; URS Corporation; URS - Washinton Division; USAA, US Army; US Public Health Service; US Navy; Valero Energy Corporation; Vanir Construction; Wal-Mart; and Xactware.

Cui Tao, Recent Computer Science PhD Grad, Named Computing Innovation Fellow

Computer Science Department — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:33:03 -0600

Dr. Cui Tao has been named Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) by the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC).

The joint CRA/CCC CIFellow program, funded by the National Science Foundation, awards excellent PhD graduates in computer science and related fields. The award supports research and teaching for 1-2 years. In fact, the total award is approximately $140,000 including stipend, benefits, travel and other research costs. This award is highly competitive. The program received more than 900 applications in 2009 and selected only 60 outstanding awardees.

Cui defended her PhD dissertation at BYU in December 2008 and officially received her PhD in Computer Science in April 2009. During her graduate study at BYU, she worked as a research assistant in the Data Extraction research group under the supervision of her advisor, Dr. David Embley. In January 2009, Cui joined Mayo Clinic, Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics, as a research associate. She is working with Dr. Christopher Chute on biomedical ontologies and terminologies.

Cui’s proposed work focuses on using ontologies and semantic web technologies in the biomedical domain. She will develop methods and tools to automate searching processes in biomedical research. She proposed an ontology-based approach that can annotate, query, and extract information based on user requests. More specifically, she wants to accomplish these aims: (1) develop a Description Logic-based formal model for representing search criteria; (2) develop domain ontologies to model information of interest; (3) automatically transfer or capture user-defined criteria in computable rules and queries; (4) annotate the heterogeneous source information with respect to ontologies; and (5) execute the rules and queries to retrieve information from different sources and present it in the manner users want.

Congratulations to Cui for receiving this prestigious computer science award.

Bill Lund Receives the Award for Best Student Paper at JCDL 2009

Computer Science Department — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:05:10 -0600

Bill Lund received the award for Best Student Paper at JCDL 2009 (the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries) in Austin, Texas. The paper, coauthored by BYU Computer Science Faculty member Eric Ringger, was also a finalist for the best full paper at the conference.

Their paper was titled, “Improving Optical Character Recognition through Efficient Multiple System Alignment." Dr. Ringger and Bill have been working on this research for the past two years.

Bill remarked, “From my position in the Harold B. Lee Library [at BYU], I have seen a number of digital collections from our holdings in which the optical character recognition of the documents in the digital library was virtually unusable. In particular, older documents, such as 19th century newspapers, mimeographed or photographically copied documents from the mid-20th century present problems to the current Optical Character Recognition (OCR) products on the market. My research combined the output of multiple OCR engines to extract an improved output based on the combined evidence from all of the OCR outputs. This required aligning text output from each OCR engine. An additional outcome of my research was an improved application of the A* algorithm to reduce the time required to complete the alignment.”

The Joint Conference on Digital Libraries is sponsored by ACM and IEEE, and includes participants from industry and universities on topics related to the creating, access, organization and structure of digital library collections. Computer scientists, information technologists, library scientists, human factor researchers and others gather to make information accessible and useful in the digital world.

Bill’s presentation, which lasted approximately 25 minutes, was presented at the plenary session for best paper finalists. This session was attended by most of the conference attendees, an estimated 200 people.

For more information on Dr. Ringger’s research, click here.

Stephen Lynn, CS PhD Student, recieves Best Paper Award

Computer Science Department — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:37:16 -0600

Stephen Lynn, a Computer Science PhD student, recently received the best paper award at the European Interactive Television conference in Levan, Belgium. The paper, which he coauthored with Brett Partridge (CS Alum) and Dan Olsen (CS Faculty), is entitled "Time Warp Football." Using internet television technology from Move Networks and video obtained from the BYU Football office, they created a prototype of how television over the Internet can change the viewing experience. Time Warp Football allows the viewer to select the camera angle, replays, displays of statistics and most other facets of the game view experience. When the officials rule on a really close case of pass interference, the viewers themselves can work through all of the different camera angles and replay the play from as many of them as they desire.

Stephen said, "We focus on living room TV watching experiences rather than watching TV shows on your PC. The basic results from this paper include a set of interactive controls that work well for watching football (forward/backward play-by-play navigation controls, alternate camera angles, and on-demand statistics), the use of on-screen overlays as navigation guides, and video overlays of controller to help people learn how to use the system without formal training. We did in-home user evaluations of the system watching the BYU vs. Notre Damne game from 2004."

Does this system require a special television? No, the system works on standard televisions with the game being streamed over the home broadband connection. In fact, when this technology was tested in the homes of people in the Utah County area, people used their own internet service and television sets.

Paper Abstract: "We describe a system called Time Warp Football (TWF) which puts fans in control of the game watching experience. TWF uses annotated video streams to enable instantaneous forward and backward play-by-play navigation and on-demand switching between multiple camera angles. These features allow fans to easily watch and re-watch plays they are interested in from any camera angle. The annotations also allow for instantaneous game statistics whenever the fan desires. We took TWF into eleven different homes, connected it to the home TV, and provided a standard wireless video game controller to control the experience. Based on in-home user evaluations, we found that TWF provides an easy
to learn interactive TV control system, effectively uses on screen prompts to enable groups to watch an interactive sporting event, and overall provides a successful interactive TV experience."

To learn more about the European Interactive Television conference, click here.
To learn about Dan Olsen's other research visit here and here

Kendell Clement receives Fulbright Scholarship and is accepted into MIT-Harvard

Computer Science Department — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:15:46 -0600

Kendell Clement will be going to Germany as a participant in the Fulbright program. He plans to work in the computational sciences laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin while taking graduate classes on bioinformatics at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Although he is not exactly sure what research he will be involved in, he hopes it will be a good experience and give him exposure to interesting research topics in bioinformatics. He will be in Berlin from September 2009 until July 2010.

Upon returning, Kendell has been admitted to the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology graduate program. He will be joining the Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics (BIG) PhD Training Program.

Kendell is very excited about the Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics program. He said, “When I went out to Boston for interviews, I felt relatively underqualified because it seemed as if most of the other interviewees had some sort of post-undergraduate experience like working at a biotech company or having earned a masters degree. As I talked to the professors and other students, and visited the research labs, I knew that I wanted to be a part of the research there. As the result of certain divine intervention, I was admitted into the program as one of seven BIG class members for 2009.”

After receiving notification of the Fulbright Scholarship offer earlier this year, Kendell was granted deferment of matriculation in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology graduate program until the fall of 2010.

Kendell said, “I am grateful for the help and support of my professors and classmates, as well as the great research opportunities provided by BYU and the CS department that have contributed to my qualification for these opportunities.”

Tanja Brown, CS PhD Candidate, Receives NSF Fellowship

Computer Science Department — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:22:08 -0600

Tanja Brown, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and a research assistant in BYU's interdisciplinary IDeA Labs, received a 2009 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for her research proposal entitled "Cooperative Differential Games." The three-year fellowship, which provides a $30,000 annual stipend, $10,500 cost-of-education allowance and travel funds, is highly competitive, designed to recognize the top science, technology, engineering, and math graduate students nationwide.

Tanja's research explores cooperation and conflict in competitive environments, such as the marketplace, where, for example, we see firms merging and restructuring to form more efficient modes of cooperation to better compete with their rivals. The dynamics of these kinds of systems are effectively modeled as multi-agent systems, and properties of the communication and interaction networks characterizing each system lead to interesting questions about the resulting system behavior. For example, can particular teams dominate the system? Under what conditions will the team structure, or "industrial organization," of the system approach a fixed structure?

She is especially concerned with situations where agents can belong to multiple coalitions simultaneously, and where they can change their loyalties over time. This raises questions about system stability and security if agents are deceptive (i.e. declare loyalty to certain coalitions when they really behave to promote other coalitions), if communication between agents is bandwidth-limited, or if agents have varying degrees of computational power available to make local decisions. A critical issue is understanding how to create incentives so that self-serving agents end up working together for the greater good of the entire system. The theory she is developing will have implications for understanding complex networked
systems in a variety of settings.

Tanja will be presenting her first paper on this topic at the American Control Conference this summer. The paper, entitled "Stability Robustness Conditions for Gradient Play Differential Games with Partial Participation in Coalitions," is coauthored with another IDeA Labs student, Nghia Tran, and their advisor, Prof. Sean Warnick.

BYU animations bring home Student Academy Awards

Computer Science Department — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:45:28 -0600

Brigham Young University's latest animated shorts, "Pajama Gladiator," which was finished in 2008, and "Kites," which was completed in 2009, have won student Academy Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In the 36th Student Academy Awards® (2009) competition, "Pajama Gladiator" was awarded the Gold Medal in the Animation category, with "Kites" bringing home the Bronze Medal in the same category.

Twelve films submitted by eight U.S. universities were recognized with the prestigious award at the 36th Annual Student Academy Awards competition, held on Monday, May 18, 2009. Three of the twelve lauded films fell into the Animation category, and two of those were from BYU.

Two computer science students in particularmade significant contributions to the lastest award-winning films. Cory Reimschussel, a masters student in the Computer Science Departmentused technology developed in Dr. Mike Jones' Computer Generated NaturalPhenomenon Laboratory to create the clouds in "Kites." Daniel Adams, adoctoral candidate in the department used machine learning techniquesto create the crowds in the "Pajama Gladiator" arena.

In addition to the awards announced this weekend, "Pajama Gladiator" and Kites also took home two of the three Animated Student Emmy's given out this year. And, in 2008, "Pajama Gladiator" beat out more than 4,500 other submitted filmsto take home the Viewers' Choice and Producers' Choice Awards at the2008 Nicktoons Network Animation Festival.

Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, declared BYU students "the best in the industry" at a press conference on campus last year.

"Overthe years, Pixar has worked with a lot of different universities aroundthe country and hired people," Catmull said then. "One of theinteresting things is, all of a sudden, in the last few years, we foundthat BYU has risen to the top. BYU has an extraordinary program here."

To watch "Pajama Gladiator," go here.

To watch a clip from "Kites," go here.

For the official press release from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, follow this link.

See details of the awards at the Academy's site.

For information about the BYU Computer Science Animation Emphasis, contact Kiersten Nielsen or visit the program site at http://cs.byu.edu/animation

Wrap-up: The Ninth Annual Family History Technology Workshop

Computer Science Department — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:12:38 -0600

The ninth annual Family History Technology Workshop provided evidence that the workshop is beginning to expand beyond its original conception. From its beginnings, the Workshop has expanded to include a wide-range of genealogists and scientists. This year’s workshop opened with an address by Dr. Bertrand Desjardins, the first international scientist to be the conference’s keynote speaker. The conference also included more student-presented papers and more presentations by external companies involved in the fields of family history and technology. An alumnus to the department, Randy Wilson from the FamilySearch project, also chaired this year’s conference. Dr. Wilson is the first non-faculty alumnus from the BYU Computer Science Department to head the workshop committee.

Dr. Bertrand Desjardins is an expert in historical demography, a quantitative study of history and human population that relies on data, such as parish documents and civil registers, that existed before statistical tools such as censuses were widely used. Throughout his professional life, Dr. Desjardins has been associated with the Programme de recherche en démographie historique (Research Program in Historical Demography, or PRDH, for short). The PRDH is a major project at the Université de Montréal, where Dr. Desjardins is a senior researcher. The project’s goal is to create a database of the entire French-Canadian population of Quebec from its beginnings in 1608, with the hopes that this in-depth information may be used to further demographic research. One of Dr. Desjardins’ most recognizable contributions to the PRDH project is the PRDH internet site (www.genealogy.umontreal.ca), which makes its wealth of genealogical information available online. In his address at the Family History Technology Workshop, Dr. Desjardins described the PRDH project. One aspect involved applying emerging technology to partially automate the tedious process of manual “family reconstitution,” or transcribing parish records of christenings, marriages, and burials so they can be restructured into family order in a database. Dr. Desjardins also enumerated the next steps to be taken in the project, such as the implementation of additional data mining and record linkage techniques to better match records and link families together. The PRDH project currently contains information up through the 18th Century. Dr. Desjardins and his associates are working on extending the information to 1850, which would more than double the size of the database.

Following Dr. Desjardins’ keynote address, the first session of the conference began. This session, titled “Handwritten Records: Reading and Recognition” consisted of four student papers and was chaired by Dr. Scott Woodfield of the BYU Computer Science Department. A break for demos, which allowed conference attendees to network and learn more about emerging businesses in family history technology, was followed by the second general session. This session was chaired by Anne Roach of FamilySearch and focused on data extraction and organization.

After the second session, the attendees broke for lunch and an address by Dr. Charles Knutson of the BYU Computer Science Department. Dr. Knutson’s address was titled “The Dilemma of the Part-Time Genealogist.” Referencing a survey on family history work that he administered to over 600 participants, Dr. Knutson addressed the reasons why more people, even people with a strong belief in the importance of this work, aren’t involved in family history. His address included elements of family history technology that must be modified to spur younger generations to participate in the work. His suggestions include projects that can be completed in 20-minute sessions, better-developed contact preservation (a lessening of the overhead required to come back to a project after a given amount of time), transparent technology, and “instant gratification” in the results of the work. Dr. Knutson believes that if participants are able to see the fruits of their labor after only a few short minutes, if they are able to easily understand the supporting technology, and if they are able to easily reengage in the work after time away, more family history work will be completed.

Following the lunch break, the final session of the conference, focusing on record digitization and application interfaces, was held. The presenters in this session, chaired by Bob Leaman of Arizona State University, represented private businesses and organizations, giving conference attendees a feel for the trends in family history that exist outside of academia. After another short break for demos, the final portion of the conference was held, a panel discussion titled, “Conversion and Publication of Genealogical Content: Best Practices, Challenges, and Unmet Needs.” The panel was chaired by Jake Gehring of FamilySearch and included experts with diverse backgrounds in genealogical content, from traditional for-profit companies in the family history industry, to academic associations, private non-profit organizations, and medical databases.

Following the panel session, the best student paper awards were announced. Degory Valentine and Douglas Kennard, two BYU computer science students, were given two of the best student paper awards for their contributions, titled, “Implementing a Surname-Study Website with Drupal” and “Word-Spotting for Automatic Tag Suggestion in the BYU Historic Journals Project,” respectively. Carl Christensen, a BYU student majoring in linguistics, received the award for his paper, “Domain-Independent Data Extraction: Person Names.”

This year, 113 people attended the conference. For additional information about this year’s Family History Technology Workshop, or for information about participating in the 2010 conference, either as a participant or an attendee, please see the conference website at www.fht.byu.edu

The Family History Technology Workshop Organizing Committee would like to thank all conference participants, as well as The Generations Network for providing advertising in their publications and John Best and his staff at BYU Conferences and Workshops for their help in organizing and running the workshop.