by Kevin Stacey (Science News Officer, Physical Sciences)When North Korea conducted its recent nuclear weapon test, the blast had been detected by a global seismic sensing network operated by the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). The network, called the International Monitoring System, aims to “make sure …
Sometimes silence, perhaps unintentionally, speaks louder than words. Writing today in Lawfare, Timothy Edgar, a Visiting Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute, noted that neither cybersecurity nor surveillance nor encryption was mentioned once in President Barack Obama's State of the Union address last night."In past years," he writes, "Obama has sounded increasingly urgent warnings of …
“Ordinary people are being empowered,” says Professor Michael Littman of Brown University’s Department of Computer Science, “in a way that makes the experts unnecessary.” Coming from a thought leader whose research is helping create household gadgets that can be programmed in a user-friendly and natural way, it's not an unusual statement. Except in this …
"When things go wrong in today’s systems," writes Brown CS PhD student Jonathan Mace, "it can be difficult to answer questions about causes of failures, uncover dependencies between components, or understand performance or resource usage." Very few things are going wrong for Jonathan at the moment, nor is his recent performance difficult …
At Brown CS, we pride ourselves on the valuable work that our alums do and their interest in sharing their discoveries and insights with other members of our community. We're happy to hear from our alums Ardra Hren, Alex Kleiman, and Adam Leventhal, who are at Delphix, a company that helps provide "Data …
Rising cinematically in glory beside the Brihadeeswarar Temple of Thanjavur, Barcelona's Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, and the Kansai ryokans: the Carrie Tower, the Independent Man, and the Big Blue Bug? After ranking Providence with global peers in its "52 Places to Go in 2016", the New York Times might agree. "This cobblestone-lined capital," …
Many of us were popping corks and clinking glasses as 2015 turned to 2016, but Professor Stefanie Tellex of Brown University's Department of Computer Science had a special reason to celebrate: she'd recently been named one of four "Women Who Changed Science in 2015" by Wired UK. Featured alongside colleagues who used human stem cells …