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Less than a year after a receiving one of the highest honors in the field of virtual reality, Brown CS alum and former adjunct research faculty member and visiting scholar Joseph J. Laviola Jr. (now Charles N. Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida) has been recognized again.

The event featured participation from more than 400 university students from across the country and 1,000 students from 76 different countries participating virtually. Brown CS concentrators on three separate teams came home with awards.
 

The Sunlab is no longer with us. Students who graduated in the past decade or so think of it mainly as a place where they could use desktop computers running Linux and attend TA hours and help sessions. But it started as something different.

Brown CS is mourning the loss of Professor Emeritus of Computer Science Stanley (Stan) B. Zdonik, Jr., who passed away on February 5 at the age of 78. Stan was a distinguished computer scientist who made pioneering contributions to data management, with especially notable work in object-oriented databases, column-store architectures, and stream processing.

Almost thirty years after earning his doctorate from Brown CS, Yi-Jing Lin’s phone rang, and his already unconventional career took an unexpected turn.

Thinking about Tom, and our work together in the Department, several passionate themes come to mind – so many that I’ve only been able to write them at this final moment.

As the latest step in a career that’s ranged from the Marine Corps to the Department of Energy to serving as Federal Cybersecurity Lead and Senior Cybersecurity Advisor to the White House’s Federal Chief Information Officer, Brown CS Master of Science in Cybersecurity alum Nicholas (Nick) M. Andersen has taken on a prominent new role.

This summer, on a grant from Brown's Startup Fellowship program, Eric Xia developed www.word.golf with Julian Beaudry, a fellow CS undergraduate. They've done their best to follow a spirit of inquiry, creating a project which challenges the imagination while retaining a sense of familiarity and playfulness.

I was one of 26 Brown students among the 2,500 invited to the Y Combinator AI Startup School. Engulfing an entire warehouse in San Francisco, the event featured incredible speakers, leaving me with new insights about Silicon Valley and Brown’s unique elements and the future of AI ventures.

Brown University doctoral student Zainab Iftikhar is the friend people turn to when they need to talk. 

“My family jokes that I’m the ‘therapist friend’ everyone calls when they have a problem,” Iftikhar said. 

Her capacity for caregiving has informed her research at Brown, where she is focused on exploring technology’s therapeutic strengths and weaknesses to find ways people can best use AI to support social and mental health. Her research has spotlighted humans’ inherent ability to offer and detect empathy, which is something that chatbots, text-based therapists and other artificial intelligence systems don’t do well, she said.