Now in its seventh year, the Brown Venture Prize, given by Brown University’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, awards a total of $50,000 to empower the most advanced entrepreneurial ventures by Brown students. It’s intended to help them accelerate and scale their innovations through funding, critical mentorship, and access to leaders in the Brown entrepreneurial community and beyond. This year, four of the eight honorees, including the first place and second place winners, were teams that included Brown CS students, faculty, or alums.
Held in Orlando, Florida, this week, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Virtual Reality conference (IEEE VR) is widely considered the premier international venue for the presentation of research results in the broad area of virtual reality (VR). The event’s Best Paper Awards are given to approximately the top 1% of total submissions, and new work, “Evaluating Text Reading Speed in VR Scenes and 3D Particle Visualizations”, from Brown CS alum Johannes Novotny and faculty member David Laidlaw, his doctoral advisor, is one of just six winners.
“Once you you get people on board with the idea that we should do something about making sure our systems are fair and unbiased and accountable, the next obvious question is how do you do that?” says Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian, who premiered CSCI 1951z, Fairness in Automated Decision-Making, last fall. “This class is really trying to answer that.”
The Fulbright Program’s 2023-2024 year saw Brown University students and alums earn 36 Fulbright scholarships, the second-highest number in the nation. One of them, Bill Marino, is a recent recipient of Brown’s Master of Science in Cybersecurity, a fully online degree program that can be completed from anywhere in the world.
Brown Engineering and Computer Science Associate Professor Nora Ayanian will present at the 2024 SXSW Conference, held March 8-12. SXSW provides an opportunity for the global community of digital creatives to encounter cutting-edge ideas, discover new interests, and network with other professionals who share a similar appetite for forward-focused experiences, and the 2050 track where Ayanian’s presentation falls showcases long-range, big-picture thinking, with topics that range from nanotech breakthroughs and interplanetary expeditions to life-extension research and novel applications of scientific discoveries.
In the current issue of ACM Interactions Magazine, Assistant Professor of Practice Ian Gonsher presents a collection of prototypes developed at the intersection of robotics, ubiquitous computing, mixed reality, and furniture design. These design research projects also call attention to inequalities between local and remote telepresence users, and offer viable alternatives away from the dominant paradigm of personal devices towards the development of extended reality infrastructure as a public good.
Advancing a commitment to accessible robotics education, the Brown CS PhD student is researching how to simultaneously control multiple drones and teaching others how to build and operate them.
On January 24 of 2024, I attended the Computer History Museum (CHM)’s huge celebration in Silicon Valley for the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Apple Macintosh, where Brown CS got a shout-out during the two-hour program. Why would that be? I thought it would be interesting to those who weren’t around to learn about how universities – Brown in particular – were instrumental to the success of the computer that many now take for granted.
Every year, the Computing Research Assiciation (CRA) recognizes North American students who show phenomenal research potential with their Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, and for 2023-2024, four Brown CS students received honors: Megan Frisella (Finalist) and Anh Truong, Qiuhong Anna Wei, and Carolyn Zech (Honorable Mention).
Newcomers to the field of computer science who see it as more than just a ticket to a job at a big tech company have found a kindred spirit in Brown CS faculty member Michael Littman, who has just released Weird Computer Science, a new series of educational videos.
