AI Song Finalist
June, 16 2022

Professor Dan Ventura and a team of colleagues from Idaho State (Paul Bodily a BYU CS alumnus, Jon Armstrong, and Claire Smedley-Dye ) recently entered an international AI song contest and found out that they made the finals. Listen to team Pop*'s song here: https://www.aisongcontest.com/the-2022-finalists.
CS Professor and team from Idaho State are AI Song Finalists!
International Collegiate Programming Contest
June, 01 2022

The BYU team consists of Braydon Hunt, Teikn Smith and Lawry Sorenson with Dr Ryan Farrell as their advisor.
The NAC (North American Championship) this last weekend was to determine which teams would advance to the world finals.
College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Staff Award
April, 25 2022

She’s a great support to the chair. She’s been willing to take on tasks outside her job description to help the needs of the department.
Erin Rowan is the Department Secretary in Computer Science. She handles financials, supports faculty recruiting, and trains part-time staff and students.
ICPC Regional Programming Contest
March, 23 2022

It's still unofficial how many teams from each region will advance, but our team that came in 2nd place will probably go to the North American Championships in late May to compete against the top teams in the US and Canada (there are some really, really good teams there!). Sadly, only 1 team per school can go, so even if they allow a 3rd team from our region, we cannot send both of our top teams... which is heartbreaking given how close the two teams were (only 2 mins!).
BYU Computer Science teams claimed both 2nd and 3rd place in the regional programming competition. Our team in 3rd place was only 2 minutes behind our team in 2nd! We had two really strong teams. You can see the full results (now finalized) here: https://rmc21.kattis.com/standings
Musical Phrase Segmentation via Grammatical Induction
March, 14 2022
Friday, April 1st at 1-2:00pm, Summit Room 3346 TMCB
Advisor: Dan Ventura
Reed Perkins MS Thesis Defense
Student Emmy Nomination
March, 04 2022

"Their short animated film, “Stowaway” was nominated for a student Emmy for Best Animation, and the winner will be announced next month at the College Television Awards." from https://www.ldsliving.com/this-short-film-directed-written-and-produced-by-latter-day-saints-was-just-nominated-for-a-college-emmy/s/10461
Students from the BYU Animation Program received 4 of the 16 nominations, more than any other school.
Code: Debugging the Gender Gap
March, 03 2022

Register for FREE viewing at PEERYFILMS.BYU.EDU! Thursday, March 10th Reynolds Auditorium HBLL & Friday, March 11th, Varsity Theater WSC
Enhancing the Opportunities for Adults with Autism to Find Jobs Using a Job-Matching Algorithm
February, 28 2022
Wednesday, March 16th at 12-2:00pm, on Zoom
Meeting ID: 974 5563 5628
Meeting Passcode: 128976
Advisor: Yui-Kai Ng
Joseph Bills MS Thesis Defense
Symbolic Semantic Memory in Transformer Language Models
February, 14 2022
Wednesday, March 2nd at 3-4:30pm, Summit Room 3346 TMCB
Advisor: Dan Ventura
Robert Morain MS Thesis Defense/PhD Qualification
Creating A More Explainable and Efficient Game-Playing Agent
February, 04 2022
Wednesday, February 9th at 1pm, Summit Room 3346 TMCB
Advisor: Chris Archibald
MS Thesis Proposal for Jamison Moody
Eliciting Symbolic Association in Language Model Without Modes Tuning
January, 27 2022
Wednesday, February 2nd at 2pm, Summit Room 3346 TMCB
Advisor: David Wingate
MS Thesis Proposal for Josh Robinson
Large Language Models in Qualitative Analysis
January, 19 2022
Thursday, January 27th at 3pm, Summit Room 3346 TMCB
Advisor: Kevin Seppi
MS Thesis Proposal for Courtni Byun
Maximizing Performance of Dynamic Coalitions through LIGHT (Leadership Induced Group Horizontal Transfer)
December, 13 2021
Friday December 17 at 11:00 a.m., 2222 TMCB
Advisor: Sean Warnick
MS Thesis Proposal for Neal Munson
New Faculty Member Steve Richardson
December, 06 2021

Before joining the BYU CS department, Steve worked for 10 years at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where he was the Manager of Machine Translation (MT) and Translation Systems. Prior to working at the Church, he presided over the Brazil São Paulo South Mission with his wife Marianna. Before the mission, he worked for 17 years at Microsoft Research as a Principal Researcher and manager of the MT Group and for 11 years at IBM, including at the TJ Watson Research Center, focusing on natural language processing (NLP).
We are excited to have Dr. Steve Richardson join the faculty.
CSIDE Watercoloring Event
December, 03 2021
https://inclusion.cs.byu.edu/
Come join us for a relaxing fun event! Everyone is welcome!
Simulating Government Institutions in Networked Societies
November, 17 2021
Wednesday, November 17th at 3pm, Summit Room 3346 TMCB
Advisor: Jacob Crandall
MS Thesis Proposal Abstract for Michael Richards
BYU researchers create algorithm to predict suicidal thoughts in adolescents
November, 08 2021

If counselors could predict which kids are most likely to commit suicide, they could save lives. Researchers from Brigham Young University, Johns Hopkins and Harvard have come up with an algorithm that predicts suicidal thoughts and behavior among adolescents. Their findings could lead to more effective measures to prevent suicide. (From https://ksltv.com/476011/byu-researchers-create-algorithm-to-predict-suicidal-thoughts-in-adolescents/)
“I’ve had close friends that have had suicides in their family. For me, it’s kind of personal that way,” said BYU computer science professor Quinn Snell. “Our lab had been looking at suicidality and suicide ideation for quite a little while.” (Quote from https://ksltv.com/476011/byu-researchers-create-algorithm-to-predict-suicidal-thoughts-in-adolescents/)
Modeling User Relationships in Online Communities of Creators
November, 04 2021
Friday, November 19th at 1pm, 3350 TMCB
Advisor: Nancy Fulda
MS Thesis Defense for Berkeley Andrus
New Faculty Member - Brett Decker
October, 20 2021

Brett Decker received a BS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University in 2012. He then was hired full-time at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL)---he first started working for SNL as a student intern in 2010. As part of SNL’s Critical Skills Master’s Program, Brett obtained a MS in Computer Science from Brown University in 2015. At SNL, Brett has been a software engineer, architect, and lead on various secure embedded and PC software systems. Brett came to BYU in Fall 2019.
I have a lot of hobbies, though I'm not good at all of them: reading, gardening, basketball, racquetball, board game design, piano, banjo & anything my kids are interested in.
Beware of IPs in Sheep’s Clothing: Measurement and Disclosure of IP Spoofing Vulnerabilities
October, 11 2021
Thursday, October 21st at 3pm, Conference Room
Advisor: Casey Deccio
MS Thesis Defense for Alden Hilton
Communication Effects when Playing with Humans in Multi-Round Games
October, 06 2021
Thursday, October 21st at 3pm
Advisor: Jacob Crandall
MS Thesis Defense for Tim Whiting
Eric Mercer receives Amazon Science Award
September, 11 2021

Dr Eric Mercer was the 2021 Amazon Research Awards recipient in AUTOMATED REASONING.
Mercer wins coveted Amazon Science Award
Online Learning for Hybrid Text Corpus Simplification and Named Entity Recognition
September, 08 2021
Monday September 13th at 2pm
Advisor: Mark Clement
MS Thesis Defense for Brandon Bingham
Reducing the Manual Annotation Effort for Handwriting Recognition Using Active Transfer Learning
July, 23 2021

Friday July 30 at 10am
Advisor: Mark Clement
MS Thesis Defense for Eric Burdett
New Faculty Member - Dr. David Grimsman
June, 19 2021

David is a recent graduate of the University of California Santa Barbara in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His research interests are centered on multiagent systems, game theory, distributed optimization, mechanism design, and security, however, he’s genuinely open to new domains of thinking which may challenge his assumptions or deepen his appreciation of current understanding. Alongside his academic pursuits, he has been able to work in industry for Applied Invention and MIT Lincoln Laboratories, allowing him to apply theory to several industries, including agriculture, national defense, travel, security, and aerospace. He has also been a leading member of Achilles Heel Technologies, a startup company applying systems theory to the security of critical infrastructures.
In his spare time, David enjoys watching and playing sports – really anything that’s active and strategic. He’s excited to be here at BYU with his wife, Kalisha, and his four children: Rose, Harvey, Elaine, and Walter.
Contrastive Pre-training for Discourse-Aware Conversation Models
June, 15 2021
Thursday, July 8th at 11:00am, 3350 TMCB
Advisor: Kevin Seppi
MS Thesis Defense for Roland Laboulaye
Exploring Non-functional Coupling Between Subsystems
June, 08 2021

Wednesday, June 23 at 11:00am
Advisor: Jonathan Sillito
MS thesis defense for Matt Pope
Simple SSH Management
May, 19 2021
Wednesday, June 9th at 4:00pm
Advisor: Daniel Zappala
MS Thesis Defense for Torstein Collett
Mental Health Awareness Month
May, 05 2021

Visit inclusion.cs.byu.edu for resources and more information.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Let's work together to make sure no one feels alone, especially during these troubling times.
Healing Racism Through Jesus Christ
May, 05 2021

Watch Ryan Gabriel's devotional, Healing Racism Through Jesus Christ, and learn more about how we can "work hard to heal the painful legacies of racism that we inherited."
"To pretend race is not important does not show compassion for the experiences of others who, by virtue of their experiences with racism, know that it is. Christ does not ask us to ignore or wish away another's pain but to know it and touch it." -Ryan Gabriel, assistant professor of sociology