From online graphics to ways for technology to communicate using vibrations, BYU alumnus Kesler Tanner has made significant contributions to computer science.
After Tanner graduated from BYU with a master’s degree in computer science, he began working as a web developer at Lucidchart.
“They’re the Google Docs of online graphics,” Tanner said. “We were building real time, collaborative tools to help people do diagramming together.”
After working at Lucidchart for a year, Tanner moved on to pursue a PhD at Stanford University. At Stanford, Tanner designed a tool for anonymous storytellers to work with Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace where people can do simple jobs to earn anything from a couple cents to a few dollars.
“We used this marketplace to build a tool where people could easily get help when they’re writing creative stories,” said Tanner.
Tanner also worked with electromyography — the signals that your brain sends to your muscles. He developed a device that can keep track of how long someone has been running based on the runner’s movements. The device can then communicate that information to the runner based on a series of vibrations.
“Imagine if you were jogging outside and you wanted to know how long you’ve been running. You could do [a certain] gesture to ask this question, and then you would feel the response back as a vibration,” said Tanner. “We created this simple vibration language and this [movement] language to ask [the device] questions.”
Three specific things helped Tanner as he transitioned to Stanford from BYU: valuable classes, the ACM club, and good research experience.
“The classwork gave me a really good core to build upon,” Tanner said. “They gave me a good foundation where I could learn . . . and understand concepts.”
BYU classes also proved an advantage for Tanner because many of them covered prerequisites required for all Stanford CS PhD students.
“Because of the classes I took at BYU, I’ve been able to waive out of more than half of those,” Tanner said. “Some of my fellow students coming from other universities haven’t had the same luck. That’s made me, in retrospect, really grateful for a lot of professors and the way they structured their classes to [help me] get the best education at BYU.”
Second, Tanner was the president of the BYU chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for two years. As President of ACM, he was able to become friends with fellow computer science students, build his network, and improve his computer science skills.
“[ACM] encouraged me to participate in programming competitions that helped me work quickly on my feet,” Tanner said. “A lot of computer science jobs have very technical interviews where they have you solve problems that aren’t necessarily taught in BYU classes. That’s one of the strong points of ACM.”
Third, Tanner was able to conduct research alongside computer science professor Christophe Giraud-Carrier for two years.
“That really was what paved the way for me to go to grad school,” Tanner said. “It helped me develop some of the skills that I use here.”
In his research, Tanner encountered new obstacles that were different from the problems he faced during his coursework.
“In classes, problems are very well defined and it’s known beforehand what you need to do to excel or do well in these classes,” Tanner said. “With research, you’re trying to push things farther than they’ve ever been pushed before and that’s a lot harder to measure.”
Although Tanner is pleased with his current accomplishments, he is also excited for the opportunities the future holds for him.
“I have accomplished certain things since graduation, but . . . I’m excited about the future and the current possibilities that I have,” Tanner said. “I definitely attribute BYU to getting me on this path for potential success.”