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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 …
Brown CS faculty member Yu Cheng, the department’s new ICPC coach, is himself a prior ICPC World Finalist. On February 25, he brought twelve students to the ICPC’s 2022 Northeast North America (NENA) Regional Contest at the College of the Holy Cross site: one team ranked sixth, earning one of four silver medals, and advanced to the North America Championship (NAC), to be held at the University of Central Florida in May. Their competitors will include teams from 50 universities from the United States and Canada that advanced to the NAC from one of the 11 North America Regional Contests, …
Our most significant lecture of the year honors Paris Kanellakis, a distinguished computer scientist who was an esteemed and beloved member of Brown CS. Paris joined us in 1981 and became a full professor in 1990. His research area was theoretical computer science, with an emphasis on the principles of database systems, logic in computer science, the principles of distributed computing, and combinatorial optimization.
Deep Learning (DL) is a rapidly growing field that has found a set of wide-ranging applications across various industries, such as transportation, banking and finance, healthcare, and more. As the use of DL becomes more widespread, DL frameworks, such as TensorFlow and PyTorch, have, in turn, become increasingly popular, and are being used to build models that are applied even in security-critical settings. Thus, with their increasing popularity, the importance of keeping these frameworks secure has become crucial.
Brown CS has been mourning the loss of our colleague and friend, Rosemary Simpson, who was a valued member of Andy van Dam’s research group and a fixture in the halls of the CIT for more than twenty-five years. She passed away in late 2022.
The need for exploit mitigations is more critical than ever,” says Brown CS faculty member Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis, “and even more so when it comes to critical infrastructure. Despite years of research, software hardening still revolves around a ‘protect everything, the same way, all the time, at the same intensity’ approach that works well only with defenses that have negligible performance overhead and are oblivious to the settings in which the hardened software is used.”
The Randy F. Pausch '82 Computer Science Undergraduate Summer Research Award, given this year to Anh Truong and Qiuhong Anna Wei to support their work with Brown CS faculty members Daniel Ritchie and Srinath Sridhar, respectively, recognizes strong achievement from undergraduate researchers and offers them the opportunity to continue their work over the summer.
Last week, Brown CS faculty member Kathi Fisler was an invited panelist at Stanford University's inaugural Embedded Ethics Conference, which offered broad discussions applicable to creating effective ethics education programs, covering the full life cycle of program creation, development, and implementation. Panelists from different universities addressed creating new ethics initiatives and how to structure a successful program once this is done, while instructors presented live teaching demonstrations and ethics curricula.
Late last year, the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director announced that Brown CS alum Nick Leiserson is the new Assistant National Cyber Director for Cyber Policy and Programs, serving under National Cyber Director Chris Inglis. By statute, their office serves as the primary advisor to the Biden-Harris administration on cybersecurity policy and incident response and works with national departments and agencies to implement national cybersecurity strategy.
Speaking before a U.S. Senate committee on the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence, computer scientist Suresh Venkatasubramanian urged lawmakers to establish regulations to govern AI-based systems.
