Parris K. Egbert has been appointed chair of the Brigham Young University Computer Science Department effective June 1, 2008. Egbert replaces Tony R. Martinez who has served as chair of the department the past nine years.
In addition, Christophe Giraud-Carrier has been appointed as the associate chair of the department. Giraud-Carrier is an associate professor and coordinator of the Data Mining Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at BYU.
Egbert received bachelor degrees in computer science and mathematics from Utah State University in 1986. He then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he completed his master’s and doctoral degrees (1991 and 1992) in computer science. Upon completion of his doctorate, he joined the BYU computer science faculty.
He is the director of the 3D Computer Graphics Lab in the Computer Science Department at, which is currently conducting research in several areas related to interactive 3D graphics and virtual environments. This work has been published in SIGGRAPH, CVPR, Transactions on Graphics, Computational Intelligence, and other journals and conferences. He is also a member of the executive committee for the Center for Animation at BYU.
Prior to joining BYU, Giraud-Carrier was senior manager at ELCA, a Swiss IT services company, where his responsibilities included the capitalization of data mining expertise, responses to tenders and the management of various projects for companies, local governments and NGOs.
Prior to this, he was a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol, where he founded and led the Machine Learning Research Group. Giraud-Carrier received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science at BYU in 1991, 1993 and 1994, respectively.
For more information, contact Lynn D. Patton at (801) 422-4022.
Writer: Lynn D. Patten