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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.

Last month, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) named Brown CS alum Danfeng (Daphne) Yao (now Professor of Computer Science, Elizabeth and James E. Turner Jr. '56 Faculty Fellow, and CACI Faculty Fellow at Virginia Tech) an IEEE Fellow, recognizing her “for contributions to enterprise data security and high-precision vulnerability screening”.

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."

Brown CS is hiring multiple tenure-track faculty members at the level of Assistant Professor and a faculty position at the rank of lecturer, senior lecturer, or distinguished senior lecturer. We also have two postdoctoral opportunities available.

Brown Engineering and Computer Science Professor Sherief Reda has been elevated to a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for class of 2023. Reda was recognized for contributions to energy-efficient and approximate computing.

In 2022, generative AI went mainstream. Mere months ago, it still seemed exclusively the province of the ML research community and of Twitter, where meme accounts like @weirddalle shared the results of feeding text-to-image generation models off-the-wall prompts like "a bottle of ranch dressing testifying in court."  

Cut to the present, where generative AI startups like Stability AI and Jasper are raising $100 million rounds of funding, big players like Microsoft have announced upcoming integrations of text-to-image generation, and perhaps all of us have used OpenAI's DALL-E 2 to create create something delightful like this "chicken nugget dressed as a …

The European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA) recently announced that Julie Nguyen Brown Professor of Computational and Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Computer Science Sorin Istrail, along with collaborators, won the ESA 2021 Test-of-Time Award for their 2001 paper “SNPs Problems, Complexity, and Algorithms.” The award recognizes “excellent papers in algorithm research that were published ... 19-21 years ago and which are still influential and stimulating for the field today,” according to the ESA. Giuseppe Lancia of the University of Udine, Vineet Bafna of UC San Diego, Ross A. Lippert of DE Shaw Research, and Russell Schwartz of Carnegie Mellon University …

The 30th European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA) last month awarded the ESA 2021 Test-of-Time Award to Brown CS Professor Sorin Istrail and his collaborators for their ESA 2001 paper called “SNPs Problems, Complexity, and Algorithms.” The award recognizes “excellent papers in algorithm research that were published … 19-21 years ago and which are still influential and stimulating for the field today,” according to the ESA.