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AI-driven user profiling based on user data is a key component of providing a personalized experience on Facebook. However, public concern has grown around social media platforms profiling users to infer fine-grained interests and characteristics such as race, religion, or socioeconomic status, which can be used for secondary purposes such as targeted advertising. In fact, there have been recent public outcries over how such micro profiling has been used to sway political views, as well as concern over how people’s emotional and psychological well-being can be negatively affected. This project investigates how to leverage one of the most popular medium for engaging viewers, Youtube videos, to increase digital literacy and help users limit such profiling. This is an interdisciplinary effort drawing from Media and Film studies, Applied Artificial Intelligence, and Human-Computer Interaction.

Ten Computer Science students, including Stanley Fujimoto and Eric Burdett, have been instrumental in using handwriting recognition to find which people died in the 1918 pandemic in the United States. To create the dataset, students identified and retrieved hundreds of thousands of relevant images from FamilySearch.

“That’s been quite a process because their collections are just massive,” said Burdett, who wrote computer code to interface with FamilySearch’s system. “We have access to millions and millions of records from FamilySearch, resources a lot of researchers haven’t had before.”

To teach the computer to extract relevant entries from certificates with varying layouts, Fujimoto modified and trained object detection algorithms typically used to identify people or cars in images. The students in the lab transcribe causes of death using a state-of-the-art handwriting recognition algorithm created by former BYU graduate student Curtis Wigington. Once they obtain the transcriptions, students assign a diagnosis code to the certificates to standardize differing ways coroners described the same cause of death. The automated process has allowed them to transcribe over 100,000 death records in under 2 hours, compared with the weeks or months of labor that human-generated transcriptions require.

For many, involvement in the project will shape their professional futures.

“This project is giving us the skills to be able to function in jobs in big fields in computer science like machine learning and artificial intelligence,” Burdett said.

As for Fujimoto—despite his past indifference to genealogy—seeing cutting-edge computer science and machine learning applied to family history has inspired him to take a full-time position as a data scientist with Ancestry.com.

Connor Anderson MS Thesis Defense/PhD Qualifying Process

Animated film festivals are going the way of other social gatherings — most are indefinitely

postponed or canceled — but that hasn’t stopped the BYU animation program from winning

awards.

Thursday, January 9th at 11:00 am
in 1170 TMCB
Host: Jacob Crandall

Water animation gets easier thanks to BYU professors

Nancy Fulda
PhD Dissertation Defense
July 31, 2019 at 11:00 am
3350 TMCB
Advisor: David Wingate

You probably won't hear BYU animation students shouting, "We're No. 1!" but we'll shout it for them. Animation Career Review named BYU's animation bachelor of science program the best in the country.