After working hard to make computer science part of his high school courseload, a young Nick DeMarinis was thrilled to end up in an advanced placement CS course in his senior year with a “really kind of eccentric” teacher at the helm. Nick is the most recent hire in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, the largest expansion in Brown CS history. Having successfully defended his doctoral thesis last September, he’s returning to the department this July as lecturer.
At last month's Commencement ceremony, Brown CS presented diplomas to 366 undergraduate students, 21.8% of all the undergraduates who graduated from Brown this May. It's the highest number of graduations ever from a single department or school at Brown, and just as it’s been for the last six years, Computer Science is the most popular concentration on campus.
This week, Brown University hosts the Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM), bringing over 500 of the field’s thought leaders to Providence and demonstrating Brown’s continued status as one of the world’s leading centers for reinforcement learning (RL) research and study. Attendees will include the field's founders, Andy Barto and Rich Sutton, and many others who have made seminal contributions, including Peter Dayan, who in 2017 received a Brain Prize for identifying how RL principles explain the workings of the dopamine system in the brain and its implications for human decision-making and its disorders.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced recently that Professor Michael Littman of Brown CS will join as their division director for information and intelligent systems for the next two years. While retaining his role at Brown, Michael will oversee AI-related research funding and coordinate AI efforts between government agencies in his new role.
CS With Impact, the largest expansion in Brown CS history, has added five new faculty members this spring:
“As a software developer,” says Brown CS alum Gaurav Manek, “it is your duty to society to make sure that your code is reliable and doesn’t fall apart.” For the last four years, Gaurav — now a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University — has been developing Visigoth, a piece of software that automatically creates schedules based on the availability of participants. Now, Brown CS and a number of departments at other universities are adopting the software to handle the logistics that surround PhD visit days.
Five Brown CS students and alums, Jessica Dai, Arman Maesumi, Shane Parr, Seiji Shaw, and Benjamin Spiegel, received NSF Graduate Research Fellowships last month for their research in computer science. The fellowship program, which is the oldest of its kind, recognizes and supports graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and math who show significant potential for future contributions to their field.
Brown CS alums Shira Abramovich, Jessica Dai, and Hal Triedman are three of thirteen students chosen for the inaugural 2022 design and technology program of the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE).
Congratulations! We are very proud of your achievements!
The theme of this letter is inspired by an artistic work created by one of our Computer Science graduates of the Class of 2020.
Brown CS Professor George Konidaris has just received a Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award. This honor, given annually by Brown’s Office of the Vice-President for Research, was established to support excellence in scholarly work by providing funding for selected faculty research projects of exceptional merit with preference given to junior faculty who are in the process of building their research portfolio.
