Events take place in the Upstairs Hall of the Hinckley Center
9:00 a.m. Welcome by Mark Clement
9:05 a.m. Keynote
Jack Reese, Eric Burdett, Stanley Fujimoto (Ancestry)
10:00 a.m. Developer Talks / Research Talks (15 minutes each)
When Henry Silverstein Got Cold: Using Technology to Reconstruct a Case of Census Fraud (Tammy Hepps, Treelines.com)
When Henry Silverstein Got Cold: Using Technology to Reconstruct a Case of Census Fraud On January 2, 1920, Henry Silverstein began his first day as a census enumerator by turning left instead of right, and things went downhill from there. At the time, he successfully concealed from his supervisors that he resorted to an illegal scheme to finish the job. This talk will review how technology ranging from record matching to GIS mapping uncovered the true extent of Henry’s deception a century later. While this kind of fraud is rare, this investigation points to ways that technology can help genealogical researchers become better critics of the sources they rely upon.
(This talk will be a behind-the-scenes look at the research that went into this essay.)
Crawling dusty narratives (Kimball Clark, Kindex)
Nearly seven years after its release, Kindex.org debuts a clever path for users to opt in to publishing private historical narratives, without compromising user privacy. Learn how Kindex does this with the meld of machine learning, crawlers, and crowd-sourced transcription.
Handwriting Recognition Without Annotation (Patrick Schone, FamilySearch)Paper
11:00 a.m. Break
11:15 a.m. Developer Talks/Research Talks (10 Minutes Each)
The Release of GEDCOM 7.0 and the Future of GEDCOM (James L. Tanner, FamilySearch, The Family History Guide)Paper
Neural Genealogical Relation Tagging (Patrick Schone, Wesley Ackerman, FamilySearch)Paper
Machine Learning for the Restoration of Historical Images (Nathan Byers, BYU)
For our capstone project we are working to harness the power of machine learning for the restoration of historical images. We believe making this machine learning technology more accessible to all people will help build deeper connections with their ancestors. We would like to integrate our application with FamilySearch to allow users to restore images stored on FamilySearch. We would also like to get our product in front of more people, in order to help us test our product and get user feedback. To accomplish this, we would love to give a demo of our application to several individuals at the Family History Technology Workshop.
Here is the link to our product: http://restore.familytech.byu.edu:8080/
Distinguished Individuals (Stephen Smith, FamilySearch)Presentation
12:00 p.m. Lunch
1:00 p.m. Lightning Talks (3 minutes each)
Family History Therapy - Bronze Frazer and Emma Ausman (BYU FHTL)
Globalized Performance of Family History (Jessica Yauney, FamilySearch)
Auto indexing historical letters and diaries (Moses Hansen, BYU RLL)Presentation
Auto indexing city directories (Collin Zoeller, BYU RLL)Presentation
Using sequential classification to reduces costs of training data (Jackson Roubidoux, BYU RLL)Presentation
BYU Pathway Collaboration in Africa (Meg Wright, BYU RLL)Presentation
Growth Spurt: Creating customized family history tasks (Kevin Richins, BYU RLL)
Census Tree (Nathan Schill, BYU RLL)Presentation
Identifying Fake People in Census Records (Allen Otterstrom, BYU RLL)Presentation
Date Filters on Data Collections (Karlee Twiner, BYU Family History)
2:00 p.m. Afternoon Break
2:15 p.m. Developer Talks / Research Talks (15 Minutes)
Family History Archives: More Research on Permanent Media (Barry Lunt, BYU Cybersecurity)Paper
The 1910 Census Project: Combining Automation and Human Insight to Grow the Family Tree (Joe Price, BYU)PaperPresentation
Goldie May: Software Power Tools for Genealogists (Richard Miller), https://www.goldiemay.com
Everyone Has A Story: An Argument for Full Indexing of Records (Bill Barrett)Paper
3:15-3:30 p.m. Concluding Remarks by Joe PricePresentation