Dr. David Wingate loved programming even when computers didn’t have disks and he couldn’t save any of the code he had painstakingly entered.
“You had to type [the program] in every time,” Wingate said. “But I remember thinking, ‘This is really neat! I can tell this thing what to do and it does it.’”
Wingate, who arrived at BYU this fall as a new assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, started working with computers as a young child. He used old machines his physicist father brought home, including the TI 99-4a, which was released in 1981.
“I would change random things in the program,” Wingate said. “Sometimes it would break spectacularly, and sometimes it would do something really weird, and I just thought that was really cool.”
Wingate grew up working on computers and even worked several computer jobs in high school, so he knew exactly what he would study at BYU: computer science, specifically artificial intelligence.
He earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from BYU, then moved to Ann Arbor and earned a doctorate degree in computer science from the University of Michigan.
After three years as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and working in industry for a few years, Wingate is back at BYU to research and teach. It wasn’t a huge surprise for him and his family to return to Provo.
“We had always felt like maybe we should come back at some point,” Wingate said. “We just weren’t ever sure when that might be.”
The research part of his job is nothing new; he’s been involved in research ever since he was a kid changing the programs he typed into old computers. This will be his first time as a teaching professor, though.
“I’ve taught classes, but I’ve never owned a class before,” Wingate said. “So it’s a bit of an adventure. But I think it’s going to be great. I’m really looking forward to it.”
Wingate will start teaching winter semester with a class in machine learning and a class in programming languages. His research is centered on machine learning, or programming computers to find patterns and learn on their own.
“[It’s] a really interesting and important topic right now because a lot of people have a lot of data, and they like to find patterns in it,” said Wingate. “There’s so much data that people can’t look at it all by hand.”
His main focus is making machine learning more accessible to the average person. Wingate also studies robotics and medical imaging.
Wingate said being at BYU again has brought back memories, from bad dates to classes with professors who still teach on campus. He has noticed a difference in campus from his other work environments.
“There’s such an amazing spirit here at BYU and an amazing spirit on campus, and I missed that,” Wingate said.