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Vasileios Kemerlis And Ellie Pavlick Receive Promotions

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    Click the links that follow for more news about Vasileios Kemerlis, Ellie Pavlick, and other recent accomplishments by our faculty.

    Brown CS is happy to announce that pending the approval of Brown’s Corporation and effective as of July 1, 2024, faculty members Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis and Ellie Pavlick have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure.

    Vasilis Kemerlis

    Vasilis came to Brown CS in 2015 after earning Master’s degrees and a doctorate from Columbia University. Director of the Brown Secure Systems Lab, his primary interest is software, hardware, and systems security, with a focus on OS kernel protection, software hardening, and information flow tracking. Recent papers include the forthcoming “ISLAB: Immutable Memory Management Metadata for Commodity Operating System Kernels” as well as “QUACK: Hindering Deserialization Attacks via Static Duck Typing” and “SysXCHG: Refining Privilege with Adaptive System Call Filters”. Currently, Vasilis’s teaching includes CSCI 1650 Software Security and Exploitation and CSCI 2951-U Topics in Software Security, both of which were new additions to the curriculum that he developed from scratch.

    Vasilis’s recent honors include being a named a Top Reviewer for the ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS), a Distinguished Paper Award at the ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, being named a Finalist for an Artifacts Competition and Impact Award at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), being named an Outstanding Reviewer at the International Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware and Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA), and becoming a Greek Diaspora Fellow at the Institute of International Education in collaboration with the Fulbright Foundation in Greece.

    “It’s my honor,” says Richard Abou Chaaya, one of Vasilis’s former Master’s advisees, “to congratulate Prof. Kemerlis for his tenure. His teaching and mentorship were instrumental during my time at Brown and in my decision to pursue a career in software security. The popularity of his courses amongst students and his academic recognition in the field are a testament to Prof. Kemerlis's unique ability to uphold the highest standards of scientific rigor and integrity while fostering a positive, welcoming, and intellectually stimulating research environment.”

    Ellie Pavlick

    Ellie came to Brown CS in 2017 after receiving her doctorate from University of Pennsylvania. Director of the Language Understanding and Representation (LUNAR) Lab, her research seeks to understand how language “works” and to build computational models which can understand language the way that humans do. Her lab's projects focus on language broadly construed, and often include the study of capacities more general than language, including conceptual representations, reasoning, learning, and generalization. Recent papers include “How Can Deep Neural Networks Inform Theory in Psychological Science?”, “Circuit Component Reuse Across Tasks in Transformer Language Models”, and “Uncovering Intermediate Variables in Transformers Using Circuit Probing”. Currently, Ellie’s teaching includes CSCI 1460 Computational Linguistics and CSCI 1952-I Language Processing in Humans and Machines.

    Ellie was named the Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science in 2020 and received the department’s largest grant to date in the same year. Last year, she was interviewed on 60 Minutes, America’s oldest and most-watched television newsmagazine, and served on a panel at the inaugural lecture in a new series about the opportunities and impact of AI technology. Her recent honors include a *SEM Best Paper Award (“So-Called Non-Subsective Adjectives”) and a Facebook PhD Fellowship (“Meaning Variation in Paraphrase”). Recently, she was a keynote speaker at the Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) Conference, the Royal Society Workshop on Cognitive Artificial Intelligence, and was a panelist at the Debate on Sensory Grounding in AI hosted by the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness.

    “To this date,” says Roma Patel, one of Pavlick’s former doctoral advisees, “Ellie is one of the most inspiring people I have worked with in my career; both in her dedication to the research field as well as her ability to be a kind, thoughtful, and exceedingly high quality researcher and advisor. Ellie has the remarkable tendency to both provide helpful direction but also encourage students (even as untrained first year PhD students!) to take full ownership of our research, learn how to shape and execute it successfully, and be able to determine the research questions that are important to pursue in the long run. It's also just incredibly fun working with her. It's hard not to be when most conversations are spent in laughter as well as inspiration and excitement about the research being discussed.”

    For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.