Today, Brown University's Department of Computer Science announced that thanks to a new initiative, its Master of Science in Computer Science program will be accessible to a number of students who otherwise might not have been able to participate. Beginning with the Fall, 2022 semester, Brown CS will make available a small number of merit-based, full-tuition scholarships to support the Department's diversity and inclusion goals. All admitted applicants will be automatically considered for them, with no additional application needed.
Just because someone graduates with a Computer Science degree doesn’t mean they’re destined for a life of programming, with little input on the government policies that might affect their work. TechCongress, a unique program that enables technologists to advise Members of Congress on technology policy, is just one example of the many unique opportunities there are for CS graduates. Brown CS alum Eleanor Tursman was a “CS graduate student that didn’t like to code”. TechCongress has given her the opportunity to apply her knowledge to something she feels could make a huge difference.
NeurIPS, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, is a multi-track interdisciplinary annual meeting that includes invited talks, demonstrations, symposia, and oral and poster presentations of refereed papers. This year, new research (“On the Expressivity of Markov Reward”) by Brown CS alums David Abel and Mark K. Ho (now at DeepMind and Princeton University, respectively), Professor Michael Littman, and their collaborators, Will Dabney, Anna Harutyunyan, Doina Precup, and Satinder Singh (all at DeepMind) has earned one of the event’s highest honors, the Outstanding Paper Award.
"One huge highlight of my work is the effect and impact my projects have had on others,” says Brown CS alum Jemma Issroff, whose career path has allowed her to work on a wide variety of projects as podcast host, author, and backend software developer. She’s an excellent example of someone who’s able to work on highly technical challenges while still having an effect on the communities that matter to her. After several different experiences as a programmer, Jemma has found a home at Shopify, doing work that she feels has a true impact on users.
In addition to other accolades, Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi of Brown CS has been repeatedly recognized in 2021 for his contributions as a reviewer. Koli Calling is one of the leading international conferences dedicated to the exchange of research and practice relevant to the scholarship of teaching and learning and to education research in the computing disciplines. This month, they named Shriram one of four Superb Reviewers who offered consistently excellent feedback to authors and made significant contributions to the discussion. His fellow awardees are Paul Denny (University of Auckland), Stephen Edwards (Virginia Tech), and Juho Leinonen (University of Helsinki).
Irv Lustig ‘83 P’13, a Brown CS alum, has been named one of twelve 2021 INFORMS Fellows, an acknowledgement of a lifetime of achievement. INFORMS Fellows are examples of significant contributors in operations research and the management sciences, and Irv’s award comes from having demonstrated exceptional accomplishments as both an academic and in the optimization software industry. Irv has also contributed via service to the profession by volunteering on numerous INFORMS committees, including starting a project to do oral history interviews of luminaries in operations research. As many of Irv's INFORMS colleagues have written, Irv’s recognition was long overdue.
My name is Madeline Greenberg and I am the Project Manager for ‘Choreorobotics 0101’ – the first course to be cross-listed across the TAPS and CS departments. I have been organizing the Choreorobotics Initiative at Brown for the past 6 months, corralling teams of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff as we work to develop the course’s curriculum.
Choreorobotics is novel. What that means is that we don’t know what we’re doing. We are each experts, incredibly competent and hard working in various fields including but not limited to choreographics and robotics, but we’re entirely making this up as …
"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."
However, a change may be coming. Thanks to an exploreCSR award from Google, Malte is leading a team …
My name is Megan and I belong to a weird cohort of highly-specific nerds who are artists but also techies but also care about humanity but also think about the philosophical and ethical implications of their work. I am a professional dancer/choreographer who is finishing up a Master's in computer science. Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to bridge the gap between dance and computer science in a variety of projects – using a Kinect sensor and Unity to make a really hacky version of Just Dance, building a 3D convolutional neural network to recognize tap dance steps …
This report was part of the Rhode Island Data Journalism Project and has been reprinted with kind permission from The Public's Radio. For other news stories, visit https://thepublicsradio.org, download their apps, or tune your radio to 89.3 FM.
Rhodes Technologies and Rhodes Pharmaceuticals, subsidiaries of Purdue Pharma, produced pills and raw opioid ingredients out of a factory complex in Coventry.
by Hal Triedman
Since 2003, Bill Muzzy has lived on Pulaski Street in Coventry, Rhode Island, right next door to a factory compound. Like many of his neighbors, Muzzy knew that the compound made pharmaceutical ingredients. But he …
