Mike Rimer
Biography
I grew up in Arizona and northern California and am now living in Provo, Utah after completing my PhD at Brigham Young University.
I work at Fonix Corp. doing speech recognition R&D. On the weekend, I'm a partner in Caravel Games developing puzzle-adventure games. I'm starting an exciting and challenging career with the purpose of helping people find joy, hope, and understanding while making my personal dreams happen along the way.
I served a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk, Russia from Nov. 1995 - Nov. 1997. It was an unforgettable experience which taught me many things about life, truth and human nature. Russia is a wonderful place with a unique culture and people who are warm and friendly, very good at heart despite their ongoing difficulties.
I married my beautiful and beloved Olga Alekseevna Kotlova on June 10, 1999. Desiring to be together forever, on August 10th we were sealed in the Mesa, Arizona Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ. Our first child, Seth, was born on August 26, 2000. He is on the way to being a healthy and happy little boy and is the most wonderful addition to our lives! In 2001, we adopted Misha and Irina from Russia. They're all grown up now and living on their own.
I graduated at the top of my class at Peoria High in 1994. After graduating with a BS in Computer Science and a BA in Russian at Brigham Young University, I defended my masters thesis in Computer Science in 2002 and earned my PhD in 2007. My dissertation is on Improving Neural Network Classification Training. I've also dabbled in neural network structuring and growth techniques. High-quality industrial applications I've contributed to are speech recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) systems, developing algorithms and features for robust computer recognition of speech, and handwritten and printed text. I have also worked on robust page segmentation, image thresholding and enhancement of low quality images, such as aged historical records of poor quality (e.g. census records).
My personality is categorized as INFP (Idealist/Dreamer/Healer) according to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. I'm labelled as a fire dragon.
(mrimer at cs dot byu dot edu)