In October 2006, a group of BYU Computer Science alumni employed at Microsoft came together to give back to their alma mater.  Led by alum Steve Richardson and his wife Marianna, these Microsoft employees and friends of the department created the Microsoft Mentorship in Computer Science at BYU. 

The first annual campaign to raise funds for the mentorship turned out to be a huge success.  The generosity of the alumni, combined with a generous match from Microsoft, resulted in over $35,000 in funds. 

The Computer Science Department is excited by the generosity of its alumni who chose to give back.  To ensure that the funds will be used in the most efficient manner possible, half of the $35,000 will go immediately to students currently enrolled in the Computer Science major.  These “mentorships” have already allowed four gifted and talented students, highlighted below, to support themselves and their families by working in substantive mentored research projects. 

The remainder of the funds generated by the campaign will be used to create a permanent endowment.  This will assure that the donors’ generosity will benefit future students.

Mentorships allow students to deepen their academic experience at BYU.  Without financial aid of this type, many would have to turn down research opportunities in favor of higher paying but less educationally significant positions.  Steve Hulet, is one Computer Science Department alum who benefited from an undergraduate mentorship while at BYU.  He compared traditional college jobs which often “do nothing more than pay the bills,” to research positions, which help students “make ends meet by furthering [their] academic goals.”  He believes that such mentored positions allowed him, while at BYU, to gain valuable experience in his field that he wouldn’t have had elsewhere, while “allowing for a much richer university experience.”

For more information about the Microsoft Mentorship in Computer Science at BYU, please contact:

           Brent Hall, LDS Philanthropies
                        brenth@cs.byu.edu; (801) 422-4501

            Kiersten Nielsen, BYU Computer Science Department
                        kiersten@cs.byu.edu; (801) 422-9439

2007 Microsoft Mentorship Recipients 

Student: Derek Bunn                         Advisor: Tom Sederberg        Topic: Graphing Large Family Trees

Derek is playing a key role in the OnePageGenealogy project.  The goal of OPG is to devise algorithms for graphing large family trees, possibly comprised of thousands of ancestors and descendants, on a poster-sized sheet of paper.  Derek has done some excellent work on making the software interactive so that a genealogist can easily direct the creation of a large pedigree chart.  The software has successfully charted pedigree charts going back 150 generations.

Student: Micheal Deardeuff Advisor: Christophe Giraud-Carrier Topic: Data Visualization

Michael worked on data visualization and designed an interesting and novel way of visualizing trends in channel usage among customers. He presented that work at the BYU Spring Research Conference.

Student: Jeff Peters Advisor: David Embley Topic: Conceptual Modeling

Jeff worked on the automatic layout for conceptual model diagrams. He selected some graph layout software on the web and adapted it for an ontology editor developed at BYU. The system works by reverse-engineering an XML-Schema document into a conceptual model and then displaying it for further use.

Student: Peter McClanahan Advisor: Eric Ringger Topic:  Active Learning

Peter McClanahan has been working on the Active Learning for Annotation (ALFA) project in the NLP lab. ALFA will make labeled text resources available in languages where labeled corpora are scarce or non-existent.  Furthermore, ALFA enables the training of models on these new text resources.  Active learning is an approach to classification that uses automatically learned models to annotate easy cases and automatically requests the assistance of a human annotator to annotate the tough cases and to provide further guidance where necessary.  The project has also involved the creation of new active learning techniques and new ways to evaluate the efficacy of those techniques in reducing annotation cost. Peter has played a critical role in running these experiments.

Microsoft generosity is making a difference to students at BYU. Thanks to everyone at Microsoft who has made this possible.