Brown CS faculty member Maurice Herlihy is widely known for his work in practical and theoretical aspects of concurrent and distributed systems, but readers may be less familiar with one of his earliest research efforts. As a teenager, he traveled to Florence, Italy, where he helped his father, David Herlihy, on a project where he created punch cards based on data in the Florentine castato, or land registration system.
Brown University’s Eli Upfal, Rush C. Hawkins Professor of Computer Science, turned seventy in 2024. To celebrate the occasion, four of his former PhD students invited his many collaborators and colleagues over the years to FestivEli, a series of talks and informal chats about the topics most dear to Eli, and where his contributions have been long-lasting and often trendsetting.
Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) is pleased to announce that pending the anticipated approval of Brown’s Corporation, faculty members Malte Schwarzkopf and Ritambhara Singh (also of Brown’s Data Science Institute and Center for Computational Molecular Biology) will receive named professorships. Effective July 1, 2024, Malte will be the Eliot Horowitz ‘03 Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Ritambhara will be the John E. Savage Assistant Professor in Computer Science.
Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) is pleased to announce that pending the anticipated approval of Brown’s Corporation, Associate Professor (Research), Vice Chair, and Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies Tom Doeppner has received a named professorship. Effective July 1, 2024, Tom will be the Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Computer Science. Royce Family Professorships are given to faculty who “have demonstrated a high level of commitment to teaching and to advising students and to innovation and excellence in pedagogy”.
Not known for his love of convention, Brown CS faculty member Shriram Krishnamurthi recently saw an invitation to deliver a keynote address in the middle of a sabbatical as an opportunity to abandon days of quiet contemplation in favor of a subcontinent-spanning lecture tour.
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.
Held in Toronto, Canada, last month, the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (IEEE SATML) focuses on expanding on the theoretical and practical understandings of vulnerabilities inherent to ML systems, exploring the robustness of ML algorithms and systems, and aiding in developing a unified, coherent scientific community which aims to build trustworthy ML systems. The event’s organizers recognized only two papers with their Distinguished Paper Award, and new research by Brown CS PhD student Victor Ojewale was one of them.
Brown CS PhD alum Sridhar Ramaswamy has recently been named Chief Executive Officer of Snowflake, an American cloud computing–based data cloud company with headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. Snowflake is a scalable data cloud platform that allows organizations to store, analyze, collaborate and build applications on top of data efficiently. Snowflake was ranked first on the Forbes Cloud 100 in 2019 and its initial public offering raised $3.4 billion in 2020, one of the largest software IPOs in history. Previously, Sridhar held the position of Snowflake’s Senior Vice President of AI.
Brown University’s Dean of the Faculty gives out five different awards annually to recognize continued excellence in teaching, and this year, Brown CS faculty member Shriram Krishnamurthi has received the Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Physical Sciences.
“It’s humbling to receive the same award as all our prior honorees,” says Shriram, “and....what makes me happiest is to see that our junior faculty are following the same tradition that Andy, John, and Peter established in the 60s and that has been a cultural touchstone for us ever since.”
Each year, Brown CS invites one of the field's most prominent scientists to address wide-ranging topics in honor of Paris C. Kanellakis, a distinguished computer scientist who was an esteemed and beloved member of the Brown CS community. Last month, Avrim Blum, Professor and Chief Academic Officer of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), delivered the twenty-third annual Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Lecture: “Robustly-reliable learners for unreliable data”.
