2015 Program

7:30 Registration

8:00 Continental Breakfast

9:00 Invited Speaker

Joseph Shumway, AncestryProGenealogists

Life of a 21st Century Genealogist: What do they do, and what do they need in the future?

Joseph Shumway has been an avid genealogist since the age of 12. Now he works professionally as a Senior Genealogist with AncestryProGenealogists — the official research division of Ancestry. Joseph has made multiple television appearances on such shows as CNN’s Starting Point, The Jimmy Kimmel Show and Who Do You Think You Are? During his years of experience, Joseph has developed excellent problem solving skills and loves helping others uncover their family mysteries.

9:45 Lightning Talks

  1. Wesley Eames, AncestorCloud

  2. Jeff Haddon, HistoryLines

  3. Kent Andersen, A Life Story

  4. Steve Pedersen, RootsBid

  5. Charles Glancy, Peer Trees

  6. Jed Wood, Generasi

  7. Kimball Clark, kindex

  8. Nathan Brakke, Soal

  9. Ian Davis, Poppy Prose

  10. Aaron Shelley, Family Feats

  11. Matthew Faulconer, GenMarketplace

  12. Doug Kennard, Historic Journals

  13. Dan Rodziewicz, BYU Family History Technology Lab

  14. Glen Chidester, ScanStone

  15. Jessie Young, One Page Genealogy

  16. Robert Ball, Where Am I From? Showing Geospatial Location of Ancestors Through A Generational PerspectivePaperPresentation

  17. Ben Baker and Joel Thornton, Viewing Closest Relatives in the My Relatives View of FamilySearch Family TreePaperPosterPresentation

  18. Joohan Lee & Geoffrey Draper, Timeline-Enhanced Portrait Charts

  19. Curtis Wigington, William Barrett, Virtual Pedigree

  20. Jordan Montierth, Grandma’s Pie

  21. Alan Cannaday, Auto-Zoning Newspaper Articles for the Purpose of Corpus Development for Training OCR SystemsPaper

  22. Peter Ivie, Evan Ivie, Record linkage confidence through top match score analysis

  23. Brian Davis, William Barrett, Scott Swingle, 3D graph cut: Extending min-cut segmentation to handle overlap of cursive handwriting in tabular documents

10:30 Demo Session

11:00 Devotional, Demos, and Networking

12:00 Lunch

1:00 Invited Speaker: Curt Witcher, Allen County Public Library

The future of family history technology

Curt Witcher is the Senior Manager for Special Collections at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, IN where he manages The Genealogy Center, the institution’s Rare and Fine Book Collection, and the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection of Abraham Lincoln materials. Curt is the project lead on many of the library’s digitization initiatives—initiatives that include partnerships with the FamilySearch International, the Internet Archive, ProQuest, Ancestry, Fold3, and the Foundation for Online Genealogy (WeRelate wiki). He works with a team to build free family history resources at GenealogyCenter.org.

1:45 Developer Session

  1. Source Linker: Bridging the Evidence-Conclusion Gap, Randy Wilson, FamilySearchPaperPresentation

  2. Evolving Family Structures: Representation and Visualization, Robbie Hott, W. N. Martin and K. Flake, University of VirginiaPresentation

  3. New Apps, New Gallery, New Future*, Gordon Clarke, FamilySearch

  4. The Future of Family History Technology: Challenges, Opportunities and Data Sets, Jake Gehring, FamilySearchPresentation

2:45 Break

3:00: Academic Session

  1. Enabling Efficient Chinese Jiapu Information Extraction, Stephen Liddle, Derek Dobson, David Embley, and Chuck Liu, Brigham Young University and FamilySearchPaper

  2. CONFIRM - Clustering Of Noisy Form Images using Robust Metrics, Chris Tensmeyer and Tony Martinez, Brigham Young University

  3. Learning Alternative Name Spellings on Historical Records, Jeffrey Sukharev, Leonid Zhukov, and Alexandrin Popescul, Ancestry, UC Davis, High School of Economics, Moscow

  4. Intelligent Pen: A Least-Cost Search Approach to Historical Document Image Segmentation and Stroke Extraction, Kevin Bauer and William Barrett, Brigham Young UniversityPaperPresentation

4:15 Panel Discussion The Future of Family History Technology

  1. Wesley Eames, Ancestor Cloud

  2. Jeff Haddon, HistoryLines

  3. John Dilworth, Generasi

  4. Robert Gardner, Google

  5. David Embley, Brigham Young University