Steve is one of the founding students of the IDeA labs, joining in the fall of 2003. His projects included customer loyalty program research and design for the BYU bookstore, pattern-based learning for natural language processing and robotic control, with forays into system identification and control theory. While at BYU Steve received two ORCA research grants and was twice awarded the Edwin S Hinckley Scholarship. He completed internships with Sandia National Laboratories and Amazon.com before graduating in 2005 with a BS in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics. Working with the people and projects of the IDeA Labs was the highlight of his BYU experience. After graduation, he went to work on the Demand Forecasting team at Amazon.com, helping produce daily point and distribution forecasts for 8 million products worldwide.