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.
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.
Almost twenty-five years ago, the Association for Women in Mathematics established the Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize, to be awarded to an undergraduate woman for excellence in mathematics. This year, Brown CS student Mattie Ji, a senior majoring in Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Computer Science, was the prize's runner-up.
"Pivoting is a lot of what I do," Brown CS Research Associate Tom Sgouros says of a current project. It began in a familiar research area, virtual reality, and evolved in two different directions, resulting in work that offered unexpected depths along the route to an important and often neglected goal: aiding the visually impaired.
A member of the Brown CS class of 2013, Jonah Kagan is a software engineer at VotingWorks, a small nonprofit organization dedicated to building reliable, open-source election technology like voting machines, ballot scanners, and election-auditing software. When asked about the skills he uses for his career, Kagan explained that the knowledge learned in his very first computer science class, CSCI 0190 Accelerated Introduction to Computer Science, has helped him in his day-to-day life.
I am a junior at Rutgers University majoring in Computer Science and Cognitive Science. I’m really interested in research and debating questions about how minds work. Artificial intelligence research piques my interest. So, this summer, I joined the Humans to Robots Laboratory through the Brown Computer Science Artificial Intelligence & Computational Creativity Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site. I felt so welcomed. Everyone at Brown, from the professors to the staff members to the grad students and undergrads, were very supportive. The program gave me a peek into the exciting life of a full-time researcher in computer science. Every day …
Last month, Brown CS faculty member George Konidaris joined with five other artificial intelligence thought leaders in his home country of South Africa to found a commercial AI lab that may be the first of its kind: Lelapa AI. Lelapa's goal is to reverse the brain drain by enticing African AI researchers to return to the continent, and to use their talents to produce socially-grounded, Africa-centric AI for the benefit of the global south, which contains more than 85% of the world's population. Lelapa is built on three primary intentions: wisdom (in particular, Africa's niche skills in resource efficiency), family …
Last summer, I interned at Brown University’s Data Science Initiative (DSI) with Professor Ritambhara Singh. The work I was doing, in computational genetics, was fascinating. And the office space was modern and light-filled. But most importantly, the lab was filled with welcoming grad students and amazing professors who worked right next to me.
The latest cover story from Conduit, the Brown CS annual magazine, is our deepest dive yet into the inner workings of our courses and how they advance our mission of serving an increasing diversity of students who have a broader set of career and life goals. It documents a new introductory course pathway, CSCI 0111-0112, as well as a new course, CSCI 0200, where all four introductory courses come together.
In the pages below, we situate the new sequence by giving brief histories of earlier ones, examine the phenomenon of introductory course tribalism, explain the motivation for this latest …
"Computer systems are the backbone of modern applications," says Brown CS Professor Malte Schwarzkopf, "and the science of building efficient, easy-to-use, and trustworthy computer systems is about discovering key ideas that help make people get more out of their computers. Great ideas in systems have had stunning practical impact on the industry. But systems research, like much of CS research in general, suffers from a lack of diversity: only a handful of papers in the top systems conferences have non-male lead authors."