Dr. William A. Barrett is a professor of computer science at BYU, where he has served as department chair and associate chair. Prior to coming to BYU he was a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health, was employed in private industry for several years, and helped pioneer work in digital angiography and 3D medical imaging.
Professor Barrett founded the Family History Technology Workshop, now in its seventh year. His former students built a system for scanning the Church’s collection of microfilm records in the granite mountain vault. His students also created Virtual Olympics, a collection of computer graphic animations that were shown by the media and featured on the big screens at each of the individual venues during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.
Dr. Barrett is best known for his landmark research with interactive segmentation tools, namely Intelligent Scissors, introduced in 1995 and adopted into Adobe Photoshop as Magnetic Lasso. Follow-up work to this, titled Live Surface, has also received international attention. He has over 80 refereed publications and is a frequent reviewer for top forums in his field.
