The Family History Department faced a herculean task five years ago. Heath Nielson provided the answer.

The challenge was digitizing the genealogical records kept in the Granite Mountain Records Vault, a process that would have taken more than a century. But Nielson, a FamilySearch software engineer, helped develop a technology that makes it possible to complete the project in about a decade.

"Under the old technology, we did not expect to see it in our lifetime," said Paul Nauta, manager of public affairs for FamilySearch. "The time required to digitize the 2.4 million records that we have rights to digitize is (now) eight to 10 years."

Before Nielson's solution, the process was complicated, with steps and substeps required just to start scanning. Each of the 1,200 images on an average roll were captured one at a time by a camera. The flood of images would then flash on a monitor, where the operator checked for errors. These errors easily sneaked past them.

"You might blink, yawn, close your eyes and might miss the document that wasn't correctly scanned," Nielson said.

The operator, moreover, would never know if an image was not captured.

"To me that is an unacceptable situation, in particular when it comes to family history," Nielson said. "The missing image could be your family member."

With the new technology, scanning starts without delay at the click of a button. The microfilm scanner captures the whole roll of film, resulting in one long image that looks like a ribbon; hence, the pioneering technology implemented by Nielson is dubbed "ribbon scanning."

The digitized images will ultimately be accessible online, which will help push family history research forward.

"This makes it possible to reach out and touch our ancestors," Nielson said.

Nielson's interest in family history started at an unconventional age. As a sixth-grader, he visited a local family history library one day. In the library, elderly people filled out long family group sheets in pencil. Nielson had no clue what to do, but he was happy to be there.

"The Spirit of Elijah is strong in this one," his mother, Alana Nielson, said to a family history librarian.

The award presentation took place as part of the Geometric Modeling seminar held at Germany’s Dagstuhl Castle in May.  The Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics is the world’s premier venue for informatics.  The Center was created to bring together interdisciplinary researchers from around the globe.  Scientists in a number of fields relating to informatics participate in the world-renowned, invitation-only Dagstuhl Seminars and explore cutting-edge research in computer science.  Named after an early pioneer in the field of Geometric Design, the John Gregory Memorial Award, given out only every three, is the highest honor afforded at the Geometric Modeling Seminar and one of the only awards of its kind in the world.

Dr. Sederberg received the award in recognition of significant contributions to the field of computer-aided geometric design, where he has pursued cutting edge research in polynomial and spline algorithms, root finding using Bernstein polynomials, surface-surface intersection, freeform deformations and T-splines, which allow artists and designers to add detail and merge models in previously impossible ways.  His research at BYU led him to the creation of T-Splines, Inc., a company which makes T-splines available to the industry.  Dr. Sederberg is recognized worldwide for his research in computer aided geometric design, computer graphics, computational algebra, and algorithmic algebraic geometry.  He has published prolifically; 11 of his papers have been accepted by SIGGRAPH, the foremost computer graphics association in the United States.  In 2006, he received the ACM-SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award in recognition of his achievements in this field. 

Dr. Ron Goldman of Rice University, one of Dr. Sederberg’s mentors during his time at Purdue, introduced Dr. Sederberg at the Dagstuhl Conference.  In addition to acknowledging Dr. Sederberg’s accomplishments in the field of computer science, Dr. Goldman remarked, “Tom is one of the nicest people you will ever meet. He is friendly, warmhearted, accessible, calm, and tireless, as well as a devoted husband and father.”

Dr. Egbert received bachelors degrees in computer science and mathematics from Utah State University in 1986. He later attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he completed masters (1990) and doctoral (1992) degrees in computer science. Upon completion of his Ph.D., Dr. Egbert joined the BYU Computer Science faculty.

Dr. Egbert's research interests include real-time 3D computer graphics, global illumination for computer graphics, object-oriented graphics, tools for computer animation, and the creation and navigation of virtual environments. As director of the 3D Computer Graphics Lab in the BYU Computer Science Department, he is currently conducting research in several areas related to interactive 3D graphics and virtual environments. His work has been published in SIGGRAPH, CVPR, Transactions on Graphics, Computational Intelligence, and other journals and conferences; many of his students have gone on to graduate school or have accepted prestigious positions at animation studios such as Pixar and Industrial Light + Magic. Dr. Egbert is also a member of the executive committee for the Center for Animation at BYU; he and his students have contributed to several of BYU's award-winning animated shorts in the past few years.

Dr. Egbert and his wife, the former Lori Gurr, are the parents of nine children.

Speaking of the changes in the department, Dean Sommerfeldt, of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences said, "[Dr. Martinez] has provided strong and capable leadership to the department for many years. He has been an effective advocate for the department and has overseen significant growth in the teaching and scholarship activities within the department. He has helped instill a positive vision throughout the department that promises to yield continued growth even as he leaves his position as chair of the department."

Dean Sommerfeldt continued, "[Dr. Egbert] brings strong leadership skills to his new position that will help him to foster continued growth in the department. We look forward to working with him in this capacity, and we are confident that he will oversee continued outstanding teaching in the department, as well as increasingly strong scholarship. The future appears bright for the department."

Other changes in the department include the appointment of a new associate chair and graduate coordinator. Christophe Giraud-Carrier has been appointed to serve as the associate chair of the department, replacing Dr. Bryan Morse, who previously held the position. In addition, Dr. Kent Seamons has been selected to be the department’s graduate coordinator, replacing Dr. Egbert in this position.

Dr. Giraud-Carrier is an associate professor and director of the Data Mining Laboratory in the department. Prior to joining BYU in 2004, he was senior manager at ELCA, a Swiss IT services company, where his responsibilities included the capitalization of data mining expertise, responses to tenders, and the management of various projects for companies, local governments and NGOs. Prior to this, he was Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol, where he founded and led the Machine Learning Research Group. Dr Giraud-Carrier received his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in computer science at BYU in 1991, 1993, and 1994, respectively.

Dr. Giraud-Carrier is married to the former Isabelle Mauclair, and they are the parents of eight children.

Dr. Kent Seamons has been chosen to replace Dr. Egbert as the department's graduate coordinator. Dr. Seamons is an associate professor and the director of the Internet Security Research Lab in the department. Prior to joining the faculty at BYU in 2000, Dr. Seamons was the principal investigator on several DARPA-sponsored research projects at the IBM Transarc Lab in Pittsburgh, PA. He was a co-inventor of two patent applications filed in 21 countries by IBM in the area of trust negotiation. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he conducted research in parallel I/O. Dr. Seamons' current research is the creation of convenient and secure authentication techniques in open systems. His research interests are in trust and privacy in open systems, usable security, and trust negotiation. Dr. Seamons has over 45 research publications in the areas of trust and security, parallel I/O, distributed systems, and information retrieval.

Dr. Seamons and his wife, the former Linda Knupp, are the parents of three children.

The National Security Agency has selected a Brigham Young University computer science professor to mentor top graduate-level interns working on key national security issues for the U.S. Department of Defense.

As this year's Distinguished Visiting Professor, Sean Warnick will mentor top-notch interns from the NSA's Summer Program for Operations Research Technology (SPORT) program, helping them create mathematical models, conduct decision analysis and employ sophisticated simulations on some of the most state-of-the-art computing facilities in the world. 

Warnick said he was "quite surprised" when the government called him last summer and asked him to apply for the program.

"Apparently it's not just an any ordinary summer position, but an opportunity to work on a wide range of important projects," Warnick said. "I am eager to spearhead a strong relationship between our students at BYU and the Department of Defense."

Administered by the NSA Enterprise Operations Research, Modeling and Simulation Group, the position is highly competitive and is offered to a professor with a distinguished record in both decision science applications and student mentoring.

"It is important that we connect to the best emerging talent when solving critical problems," said Francine Goode, director of the SPORT program. "To help us with that, we conduct a national search and select a unique individual who not only understands the technical nature of the problems we are working on, but also has the ability to connect with students and bring out the best they have to offer."

Warnick's aptitude for connecting with students and the breadth of his research applications impressed Goode and other NSA representatives who visited his Information and Decision Algorithms Laboratories (IDeA Labs) at BYU last fall.

"It is an amazing environment where students from various disciplines come together to work on decision problems arising in a variety of areas, from microbiology to economics," Goode said of the lab.

Warnick's work focuses on the feedback control of complex dynamical systems, with applications including proteomic network reconstruction, scheduling of batch manufacturing systems, and market power and valuation analyses in merger-and-acquisition studies.

He received his doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003, was a visiting scholar in the Control Systems Group at Cambridge University during the summer of 2006 and is the founding director of IDeA Labs at BYU.

Out of the 13,000 students employed by the university, over 100 were nominated.  Nathaniel was selected from among those nominees to be recognized for his service to the university and the Computer Science Department. 

A senior in computer science, Nathaniel is from Oregon City, Oregon.  In the three years that he has worked for the department, he has gone above and beyond the average student employee in his contributions.  

One of Nathaniel's contributions has been to streamline the hiring process for students in the department.  Nathaniel created a program in which professors can go online to request students who have applied for RA and TA positions.  The requests are then sent to the department office and from there to the university employment office, allowing the entire hiring process to be paperless and online. 

Gene Larson, operations and systems manager for the computer science department, said how much easier life is with this new program.

"Students can apply and faculty can go through the selection process online," Larson said. "We used to have full-time employees keeping track of these student employees. Nathaniel's system now takes care of all this."

Office manager Gordon Billings was also impressed with Price's adaption to situations.

"He's very adept at taking requests from technical and non-technical people and deciphering what they want and need," Billings said.

More recently, Nathaniel upgraded the department's website to a Drupal system in which multiple users can take ownership over different parts of the website, managing and updating it themselves. 

James, a member of Dr. Kevin Seppi’s Applied Machine Learning Laboratory, is also a part-time faculty member in BYU’s Department of Ancient Religion.  Robbie, who researches with Dr. Eric Ringger in the Natural Language Processing Laboratory, is a recent graduate of the masters program in BYU’s Linguistics Department.  While in Prague, Robbie was able to present his master’s thesis, a paper on a Wikipedia-like interface for a database of Mayan hieroglyphs.  Both James and Robbie are seeking PhDs in computer science as a means to combine their divergent interests in ancient languages and modern technology. 

James was the primary author on the paper, entitled “Utility Issues with Active Learning for Annotation of Ancient Language Corpora.” Robbie, fellow student Peter McClanahan, and Drs. Ringger and Seppi are listed as co-authors.  As the name indicates, corpora (singular: “corpus”) are large bodies of text.  Corpora are often tagged with linguistic information, such as parts of speech.  Tags on words allow researchers to quickly and efficiently search through the text for particular word usage in specific contexts.  This enables the gleaning of important information and analysis from the writings.  In recent years, scholars in BYU’s Center for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (CPART) completed such a project involving the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Current research is focused on bodies of writing in the Syriac language, which is a dialect of Aramaic, one of the languages spoken by Christ and His disciples in the meridian of time.  A number of early Christian documents, including a huge body of work written by a man known as Ephrem the Syrian, were written in the Syriac language.  Creating a corpus of these writings should unlock new insights into the life of Christ and His early followers as well as into the nature of early Christian churches in the Near East.

However, the act of tagging, or the process of actually annotating corpora, is arduous and costly when performed by humans.  The costs of human annotation can be reduced through machine learning techniques; however computerized annotation can be less accurate.  As a result, it is difficult for researchers to decide when to let computers do the work of annotation and when it is necessary for humans to take over.  James’ and Robbie’s paper analyzes the interactions between human and machine and creates a statistical model of the annotation process using a Bayesian approach.  Their model shows when computers should shoulder the task of annotation, and when it’s best for humans to step in.  The model also shows researchers places where humans should tag the text in order to most effectively teach computers to do the work in the future.  By using this Bayesian approach, James and Robbie are able to minimize human annotation cost and better implement machine learning techniques.  Their discoveries may act as a guide for researchers as they plan future corpus creation projects. 

Article by Jake Mattinson, BYU IDeA Labs 

With her blue dry erase marker and notes in hand, Hayley Mattson stepped up to the whiteboard and began explaining the mathematics behind a bid-ask spread. She had spent the last nine months researching this model - which determines the winner in the stock market's version of survival of the fittest - and others.

Mattson is one of 10 students to benefit from a $700,000 grant given to BYU's Information and Decision Algorithms Laboratory (IDeA Labs) from the National Science Foundation in 2006. Applications have already begun trickling in from students hoping to take her and her peers' places next year

In addition to the funding from NSF, the labs receive donations from industrial partners and other groups they work closely with.

The NSF review panel chose IDeA Labs' proposal over its competitors because of its potential to function as a national model for how mentoring can be done in the computational and mathematical sciences.

Last year, IDeA Labs directors Jeffrey Humpherys and Sean Warnick received about 15 applications, and they expect to double that number this year.

"The applicant pool is looking really strong this year," Humpherys said. "We took 10 really strong people last year. ... This year I think we are going to have 12, maybe even 15 really strong students who are highly motivated and extremely energetic. And we feed off of that energy as faculty."

IDeA Labs' NSF program takes up to 12 students, who each receive a $10,000 scholarship, and immediately immerses them in an intense summer workshop known as the Computational Science Training for Undergraduates in the Mathematical Sciences, where they learn the computational skills necessary to begin developing their respective research projects. The following year, they continue to pursue their research ideas, with the eventual submission of a final paper for journal publication.

"To take everybody in and have them learn together, to have a group that feeds off each other and works in tandem, that structure could be something we see more of," Humpherys said.

Students can apply online at idealabs.byu.edu by March 14.

Photo Courtesy of Autumn Buys