We’re at a crucial moment, Brown CS University Professor Michael Littman believes, as the users and potentially the programmers of enormously powerful machines. In the face of doomsday artificial intelligence (AI) scenarios, algorithmic bias, and fears of job loss due to automation, he has a simple recommendation: we can get more happiness from our machines by telling them what our hearts desire. It’s the theme of his new book, Code to Joy, which was released earlier this year by The MIT Press.x
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) is the organization’s flagship conference in computer systems and widely considered one of the world’s two top venues in systems research. Every year, their Student Research Competition allows undergraduate and graduate students to showcase their work to the community, and this year, Brown CS student Artem Agvanian and alum Hannah Gross (now a doctoral student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology) won prizes for their work.
Every year at the Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI), the Assocation for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) awards the AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator award, widely considered the highest honor in the field of AI education. This year's recipients were Brown CS faculty member Michael Littman and his longtime collaborator, Charles Isbell of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"Pivoting is a lot of what I do," Brown CS Research Associate Tom Sgouros says of a current project. It began in a familiar research area, virtual reality, and evolved in two different directions, resulting in work that offered unexpected depths along the route to an important and often neglected goal: aiding the visually impaired.
A member of the Brown CS class of 2013, Jonah Kagan is a software engineer at VotingWorks, a small nonprofit organization dedicated to building reliable, open-source election technology like voting machines, ballot scanners, and election-auditing software. When asked about the skills he uses for his career, Kagan explained that the knowledge learned in his very first computer science class, CSCI 0190 Accelerated Introduction to Computer Science, has helped him in his day-to-day life.
The DIMACS Workshop on Foundation Models, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Game Theory, held at Rutgers University on October 19 and 20, 2023, marked the first of many foreseeable steps towards advancing a research initiative at the intersection of these topics. Organized by Brown CS faculty member Amy Greenwald and PhD student Deni Goktas, together with researchers from Rutgers University and IBM, the workshop featured a series of research talks by academics and industry professionals.
Software developed by Brown researchers can translate expressive and complex plain-worded instructions into behaviors a robot can carry out, all without needing thousands of hours of training data.
Last month, Brown CS alum John Stasko (now Regents Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech) received the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Visualization and Graphics Technical Community (IEEE VGTC).
Earlier this year, the international Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH) published the second volume of Seminal Graphics Papers: Pushing the Boundaries with the goal of collecting papers from 1974 onward that typify the conference's ground-breaking research. Of the eighty-seven papers included, fifteen have authors who are past or present Brown CS faculty, staff, students, or alums.