Just thought I would post this important event on the family blog!! Congratulations, Randy! I am proud to say I am related to you!!!!! Lisa
Yep, it’s true. Last Friday night we went to the Computer Science alumni dinner where they told everyone that Randy is amazing. We had not been planning on attending, but the Assistant Chair of the department called Randy and asked him to come to receive an award. We had been laughing all week about what award he might be receiving. I am sure you could come up with a few good ones yourselves. :) As it turns out, the department decided to honor one alumnus each year who is making a contribution to the field of computer science and to the world. The first recipient of this “Computing that Serves” award is our very own Randy. We had a good time that night, even if we had to sit at the reserved table up front with the cheeses. We had planned to sit with Tony & Pat Martinez (Tony is Randy’s graduate advisor) and Dan & Marcia Ventura (Dan and Randy shared an office while in graduate school and continues to be a good friend). We were excited to see them because they are fun people and we rarely get the opportunity to catch up with them. Oh, well. Instead we sat with and made some new friends. We also talked with three couples who were in our ward in Orem whom we had not seen for over a decade. I am including the nice tribute they gave that night along with a picture I made him pose for outside of the Hinckley Alumni Building. Just wanted to share.Love,Linette
Randy Wilson was born in Berkeley, California, and grew up in Eugene, Oregon. Randy served a mission in South Korea (Taejon ["tay-juhn"], Korea mission) and later married (“extremely well”) the former Linette Bradley. Linette and Randy now have 5 children, and live in Riverton, Utah. Randy is blue through and through, having obtained all of his degrees at BYU: a B.S. in Computer Science (with minors in Math and Korean) in 1992, an M.S. in Computer Science in 1995, and finally a Ph.D. in Computer Science, with emphasis on Machine Learning, under Dr. Martinez's supervision. From 1997 to 2003, Randy worked for Fonix Corporation doing research and development in speech recognition. In 2003, he joined FamilySearch, the engineering division of the Family History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In that context, he has been focusing on one of PresidentHinckley's priorities (October 2005 General Conference): “One of the most troublesome aspects of our temple activity is that as we get more and more temples scattered across the earth there is duplication of effort in proxy work. People in various nations simultaneously work on the same family lines and come up with the same names. They do not know that those in other areas are doing the same thing. We, therefore, have been engaged for some time in a very difficult undertaking. To avoid such duplication, the solution lies in complex computer technology. Preliminary indications are that it will work, and if this is so, it will be a truly remarkable thing with worldwide implications.”Indeed, Randy has been in charge of developing and improving matching algorithms using neural networks. His work helped find hundreds of millions of matches within a billion-person database, and he is currently helping the organization to adopt a data model that allows the evidence extracted through FamilySearch Indexing to be linked to the conclusions stored in a combined Family Tree, so that family history work can move forward without unbounded duplication of effort. Randy's work has been published in major academic journals and international conferences, and he hasbeen a key player in the BYU Family History Technology workshop. Randy presented papers at 6 ofthe 8 workshops, helped as a reviewer, acted as the demo chair for the workshop and is serving as the general chair of the 2009 workshop. In addition to his academic and professional achievements, Randy is also a talented musician. He plays the guitar, a little piano, a little violin, and has recently started learning to play the cello. Finally, Randy is one of the kindest and most genuine people you will ever meet. He is truly dedicated to serving those around him and the world is a better place because he is here. We are pleased to honor him this evening as the first recipient of the Computing that Serves Award.
:) WE LAUFF YOU, LOGAN!! :)
*THE THREE STOOGES*
