Held in Orlando, Florida, this week, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Virtual Reality conference (IEEE VR) is widely considered the premier international venue for the presentation of research results in the broad area of virtual reality (VR). The event’s Best Paper Awards are given to approximately the top 1% of total submissions, and new work, “Evaluating Text Reading Speed in VR Scenes and 3D Particle Visualizations”, from Brown CS alum Johannes Novotny and faculty member David Laidlaw, his doctoral advisor, is one of just six winners.
A member of the current Brown CS graduating class, Sabrina Chwalek participated in the Brown in Washington program last semester, which welcomes talented Brown undergraduate students who want to apply theory to practice in their concentration area to the District of Columbia. She interned at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan global security organization focused on reducing nuclear and biological threats imperiling humanity.
“Once you you get people on board with the idea that we should do something about making sure our systems are fair and unbiased and accountable, the next obvious question is how do you do that?” says Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian, who premiered CSCI 1951z, Fairness in Automated Decision-Making, last fall. “This class is really trying to answer that.”
A member of Brown CS (entered class of 1991, graduated class of 2011), Lisa Gelobter is the CEO and the founder of a tech startup called tEQuitable that uses technology to make workplaces more equitable. tEQuitable’s mission is to help companies create a safe, inclusive and equitable workplace. They provide a confidential sounding board for employees to address and resolve interpersonal conflict, specializing in micro-aggressions and micro-inequities, and they provide data and insights to companies to identify and improve systemic workplace culture issues.
The Fulbright Program’s 2023-2024 year saw Brown University students and alums earn 36 Fulbright scholarships, the second-highest number in the nation. One of them, Bill Marino, is a recent recipient of Brown’s Master of Science in Cybersecurity, a fully online degree program that can be completed from anywhere in the world.
Ji Won Chung, a third-year PhD student advised by Jeff Huang, Brown CS faculty member and researcher in human-computer interaction, has been collaborating with the developers of Sleep as Android, a popular sleep tracking app that supports vibration on alarms, anti-snoring measures, and lucid dreaming cues. Ji Won’s research focused on writing code to implement a scientifically-evaluated sleep regularity index (SRI), which is now being incorporated into the app itself, and is expected to impact the sleep patterns of millions of people worldwide.
Brown Engineering and Computer Science Associate Professor Nora Ayanian will present at the 2024 SXSW Conference, held March 8-12. SXSW provides an opportunity for the global community of digital creatives to encounter cutting-edge ideas, discover new interests, and network with other professionals who share a similar appetite for forward-focused experiences, and the 2050 track where Ayanian’s presentation falls showcases long-range, big-picture thinking, with topics that range from nanotech breakthroughs and interplanetary expeditions to life-extension research and novel applications of scientific discoveries.
In the current issue of ACM Interactions Magazine, Assistant Professor of Practice Ian Gonsher presents a collection of prototypes developed at the intersection of robotics, ubiquitous computing, mixed reality, and furniture design. These design research projects also call attention to inequalities between local and remote telepresence users, and offer viable alternatives away from the dominant paradigm of personal devices towards the development of extended reality infrastructure as a public good.
Advancing a commitment to accessible robotics education, the Brown CS PhD student is researching how to simultaneously control multiple drones and teaching others how to build and operate them.
On January 24 of 2024, I attended the Computer History Museum (CHM)’s huge celebration in Silicon Valley for the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Apple Macintosh, where Brown CS got a shout-out during the two-hour program. Why would that be? I thought it would be interesting to those who weren’t around to learn about how universities – Brown in particular – were instrumental to the success of the computer that many now take for granted.