The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced recently that Professor Michael Littman of Brown CS will join as their division director for information and intelligent systems for the next two years. While retaining his role at Brown, Michael will oversee AI-related research funding and coordinate AI efforts between government agencies in his new role.
CS With Impact, the largest expansion in Brown CS history, has added five new faculty members this spring:
“As a software developer,” says Brown CS alum Gaurav Manek, “it is your duty to society to make sure that your code is reliable and doesn’t fall apart.” For the last four years, Gaurav — now a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University — has been developing Visigoth, a piece of software that automatically creates schedules based on the availability of participants. Now, Brown CS and a number of departments at other universities are adopting the software to handle the logistics that surround PhD visit days.
Five Brown CS students and alums, Jessica Dai, Arman Maesumi, Shane Parr, Seiji Shaw, and Benjamin Spiegel, received NSF Graduate Research Fellowships last month for their research in computer science. The fellowship program, which is the oldest of its kind, recognizes and supports graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and math who show significant potential for future contributions to their field.
Brown CS alums Shira Abramovich, Jessica Dai, and Hal Triedman are three of thirteen students chosen for the inaugural 2022 design and technology program of the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE).
Congratulations! We are very proud of your achievements!
The theme of this letter is inspired by an artistic work created by one of our Computer Science graduates of the Class of 2020.
Brown CS Professor George Konidaris has just received a Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award. This honor, given annually by Brown’s Office of the Vice-President for Research, was established to support excellence in scholarly work by providing funding for selected faculty research projects of exceptional merit with preference given to junior faculty who are in the process of building their research portfolio.
The Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Lecture, a tradition of more than two decades, honors a distinguished computer scientist who was an esteemed and beloved member of the Brown CS community. Paris came to Brown in 1981 and became a full professor in 1990. His research area was theoretical computer science, with emphasis on the principles of database systems, logic in computer science, the principles of distributed computing, and combinatorial optimization. He died in an airplane crash on December 20, 1995, along with his wife, Maria Teresa Otoya, and their two young children, Alexandra and Stephanos Kanellakis.
Brown University's Department of Computer Science has just announced that Zachary Espiritu, a Brown CS student, SPOC (Systems Programmer, Operator, and Consultant), and one of the four Meta-TAs who coordinate the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant program, has just won the Norman K. Meyrowitz '81 Award. Named for an alum known for his contributions to the department, the award recognizes exceptionally meritorious service to Brown CS and is accompanied by a cash prize of five hundred dollars.
Brown CS Professor Seny Kamara's keynote for CRYPTO 2020, "Crypto for the People", which took a critical look at who benefits from cryptography as it currently stands and explores how it can be used to fight oppression and violence, has already received more than 11,000 views. Seny describes it as an atypical keynote that was shaped by his experience of being Black, an immigrant, an applied cryptographer, and in particular, an outsider: one of perhaps only two or three Black cryptographers in the world. Last month, he followed it up with an invited talk ("Crypto for the People (Part 2)") …
