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”.
Does a machine and a human understand empathy in the same way? Brown CS doctoral student Zainab Iftikhar and her collaborators suggest not entirely. The emergence of Chat-GPT has stirred up discussions around the essence of humanity in the world of artificial intelligence. Traditionally, humans have been recognized for their critical thinking, compassion, and empathy. However, a shift occurred as large language models joined the club, changing the focus of computational psychotherapy to use AI to develop models that write empathetically and blur the lines between human and machine understanding of empathy.
You’ve probably never seen infographics like these. If you have, did you ever dream of creating them yourself? They’re the work of Brown CS PhD student Tongyu Zhou. Advised by faculty member Jeff Huang, she was part of the team at Adobe that built Project Infograph It, a tool that allows laypeople to use generative AI to easily build customizable infographics from data sets and text prompts. At the recent Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, she took the stage alongside basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal for a keynote in which she rapidly turned a set of statistics from a fictional basketball …
Now in its eighth year, Brown University’s annual Early Career Research Achievement Award is presented by the Office of the Vice President for Research and supported by the Office of the President and the Provost to nurture and recognize the extraordinary research contributions of faculty. This year, Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science Ellie Pavlick is the winner in the Physical Sciences category.
Brown University's Department of Computer Science has just announced that Qiuhong (Anna) Wei, a Brown CS student in the concurrent Master's program concentrating in Computer Science and Mathematics, a researcher in the Brown Visual Computing and Theoretical Computer Science at Brown groups, and one of the Meta Undergraduate Research Assistants (MURAs) who coordinate undergraduate research, 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.
Anika Bahl, Nathan Benavides-Luu, Nicholas Bottone, Swetabh Changkakoti, Ivery Chen, Jiahua Chen, Jack Cheng, Daniel Cho, Troy Conklin, Benjamin Goff, Mandy He, David Heffren, Dylan Hu, Helen Huang, Hammad Izhar, Mehek Jethani, Anirudh Narsipur, Anna Ohrt, Nishka Pant, Sreehari Rammohan, Joseph Rotella, Shreyas Sundara Raman, Shirley Loayza Sanchez, Anh Truong, Qiuhong (Anna) Wei, Angela Xing, Carolyn Zech, and Conrad Zimmerman have each received the Senior Prize in Computer Science for their academic work as well as their service to Brown CS.
Brown University’s Dean of the Faculty gives out five different awards annually to recognize continued excellence in teaching, and this year, Brown CS and Data Science Institute faculty member Ritambhara Singh has received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching for a junior faculty member from the physical or life sciences.
On a trip to Athens as a Fulbright scholar in 2008, Brown CS alum Peter Revesz, now a professor in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s School of Computing with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies, remembered his conversations with the late Paris Kanellakis, a Brown CS faculty member. They ultimately led to his deciphering a series of enigmatic ancient inscriptions, including 28 Minoan Linear A texts, the Phaistos Disk, and most recently, the inscription on a 3rd-century Roman statue of a sphinx that has baffled scholars for almost two centuries.
Late last year, Brown University’s Roberto Tamassia (Chair of the Department of Computer Science and James A. and Julie N. Brown Professor of Computer Science) gave an invited talk at the Italian National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN), the branch of the Italian government devoted to the protection of national interests in the field of cybersecurity. Reporting directly to Italy's Prime Minister, ACN is responsible for safeguarding Italy's security and resilience in cyberspace, preventing and mitigating cyber attacks, and promoting cybersecurity awareness and education in government, business, and society.
