In addition to his coursework in the Computer Science Department, Kendall is an undergraduate researcher in the department's Computational Biology Laboratory. Kendall, along with eight other students at BYU, is applying his unusual combination of skills in computer science and biology to understanding disease and making progress toward therapeutic intervention. Although researchers have long hypothesized that a point mutation in an individual’s DNA causes certain diseases, recent findings suggest that these aliments might actually be generated by a duplication of certain genes. Kendall and his fellow researchers have trained their attention on Down syndrome, one disease caused by gene duplication.

DAAD programs are meant to create goodwill and professional relationships that will help build a solid basis for relations between Germany and North America. DAAD scholarships are highly competitive and recipients are selected by independent selection committees on the basis of outstanding academic records and convincing project proposals or statements of purpose. As the German national agency for the support of international academic cooperation, the DAAD offers programs and funding for students, faculty, researchers and others in higher education providing financial support to over 50,000 individuals per year. DAAD also represents the German higher education system abroad, promoting Germany as an academic and research destination and establishes ties among institutions around the world.

DAAD New York, which is one of 14 international branch offices, was founded in 1971 to support academic exchange between the U.S., Canada and Germany. DAAD New York maintains three major missions: to act as a bridge between U.S., Canadian and German universities, higher education professionals and students by providing information and assistance; to administer fellowships and other programs for students and scholars in the U.S. and Canada; and to contribute to Germany's public diplomacy by promoting Germany's academic, scientific, and cultural achievements in the U.S. and Canada.

In the picture at right, Kendall (center) and fellow student, Nathaniel Gustafson, work with researchers to study mice afflicted with Down Syndrome

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.

Traditional email encryption methods are too difficult to setup, requiring senders to obtain message recipient's public keys before secure communication can be sent. Easy Accessible Secure Email (EASEmail) seeks to solve the key exchange issues of encrypted email by using a lightweight symmetric key server for key exchange. Users can send mail to arbitrary recipients without directly establishing or exchanging keys with the recipient. With usability as its primary goal, EASEmail strives to bring usable secure email communication to the masses.

The emphasis is not an open-enrollment program. Students wishing to enroll must apply in the Computer Science Department Office by Friday, August 1, 2008.

Click here to download the application.

For more information, please contact Kiersten Nielsen, 3361 TMCB; 422-9439.

Computer Science Animation Emphasis MAP

Computer Science Animation Emphasis Prerequisite Chart

The creation of the Computer Science Animation Emphasis, in conjunctionwith BYU's newly created Center for Animation, will continue the trendof preparing BYU students to enter the workforce with the technologicalbackground and skills necessary to influence the growing animationindustry.

The 79-hour BYU Computer Science Animation Emphasis gives students astrong background in computer science fundamentals (38 hours) , whichis complemented by courses in visual arts (21).

Computer Science Animation students may also choose to augment theirstudies by participating in undergraduate research with one of the manygraphics-oriented research projects in the department

Advanced 3D Animation Laboratory, Dr.Parris Egbert

Computer-Generated Natural Phenomena Laboratory, Dr. Mike Jones

Computer Graphics, Vision, and Image Processing Laboratory, Dr. Robert Burton, Dr. Bryan Morse, Dr. Tom Sederberg, and Dr. Bill Barrett

The BYU Computer Science Department has a long history of contribution to the field of computer-generated animation. BYU Computer Science students have been instrumental in the production of each of BYU's celebrated animated shorts. These short films, including "Lemmings," "Petshop," "Faux Paw," "Turtles," "Noggin," "Las Piñatas," "Lion and the Mouse," and "Pajama Gladiators" have been widely heralded by the animation industry. They have garnered 7 "College Television Awards" or "Student Emmys" from the Acadmey of Television Arts and Sciences as well as 2 "Student Academy Awards" from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Upon entering the industry, BYU Computer Science students continue to excel. Each computer science student who has worked on one of BYU's animated films has gone on to graduate school or has accepted a position at an animation studio. BYU Computer Science Alumni are employed with some of the top studios in the industry, including Pixar, Disney Animation, Entertainment Arts, Industrial Light + Magic, Avalanche Studios, and LucasFilms Animation. BYU Computer Science students have contributed to a number of recent blockbuster films, including "Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Dead Man's Chest," "Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe," "Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian," "Cars," "Ratatouille," "Shrek 3," and "Transformers." Recently, one computer science alumni, Jason Smith, who is currently employed as a technology lead at Industrial Light + Magic, was named by The Hollywood Reporter as one of the industry's "Brightest and Most Talented 35-and-Under Artisans."During a speech given at BYU in 2008, Ed Catmull, president and co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Disney Animation, lauded the work in animation at BYU. He remarked, "over the years, Pixar has worked with a lot of different universities around the country and hired people. One of the interesting things is, all of a sudden, in the last few years, we found that BYU has risen to the top." Later that afternoon in a press conference, Dr. Catmull told journalists that BYU students hired as interns "come in and do production work right away and do a fantastic job." He continued, "it's amazing to suddenly see that BYU is producing the best in the industry. It's the perception not just at Pixar but also at the other studios that something pretty remarkable is happening here."

In May, Microsoft's Live Search team invited 28 of the top PhD students from the United States and Canada to travel to Redmond for an on-site interview and Live Search event. The event and interview process was unique in that the Microsoft team searched out many of the 28 candidates itself--none of the 28 candidates had received telephone interviewes by the team, and many of the candidates, including Yihong, had not even submitted a resume to Microsoft in the first place. Yihong's invitation was extended because Live Search team members had become aware of his excellent scholarship and research in the field of computer science.

The focus of the event was to improve Microsoft search. Each of the 28 participants selected had a strong background in an area related to web search. Some of the areas of expertise included query optimization, distributed computing, image process, data mining, and natural language processing. Yihong was the only participant with a primary background in his area of expertise, semantic web. Yihong remarks, "I found it exciting to be in a group of young scientists of varied disciplinary areas while at the same time with a focused general theme."

During the event, Microsoft made sure that Yihong and his fellow candidates were treated to the very best, including lodgings in the luxurious Westin Bellevue and chauffeured limousines. Yihong was able to meet with program leaders from Live Search and leading web experts from Microsoft Research. He was also given the chance to contribute in a session where the participants, Yihong in particular, were asked to share all of their "crazy ideas." He was able to offer his suggestions and insights into the future of online searches.

Summing up his experience, Yihong remarks, "I appreciated this opportunity...it gave me a chance to hear the first-hand opinions about the future of Web search from the most frontier industrial developers and researchers, as well as from many of my peers--PhD candidates from all over the North America." And he doesn't forget to add that he "had a wonderful journey to Seattle."

Libraries, private or public, offer valuable resources to library patrons. As of today the only way to locate information archived exclusively in libraries is by searching their catalogs. Library patrons, however, often find it difficult to formulate a proper query, which requires using rigid subject terms chosen by the Library of Congress, to obtain relevant results. These improperly formulated queries often yield irrelevant results or no results at all. This negative experience in dealing with existing library systems turn library patrons away from library catalogs; instead, they rely on Web search engines to perform their searches first and upon obtaining the initial information (such as book/manuscript titles, subject areas, authors, etc.) on the desired library materials, they consult the library catalog. This searching phenomenon is an evidence of failure of today’s library systems. To solve this problem, we propose an enhanced library system, which relies on the Fuzzy Set Information Retrieval model which allows partial, similarity matching of (i) descriptive tags that describe the content of books recommended by ordinary users at a folksonomy site and (ii) keywords in a user’s query to improve the searches performed on existing library catalogs. The proposed library system allows patrons to post a query Q using commonly-used words and ranks the retrieved results according to their degrees of resemblance with Q while maintaining the query processing time comparable with existing Web search engines.