This week, Brown University hosts the Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM), bringing over 500 of the field’s thought leaders to Providence and demonstrating Brown’s continued status as one of the world’s leading centers for reinforcement learning (RL) research and study. Attendees will include the field's founders, Andy Barto and Rich Sutton, and many others who have made seminal contributions, including Peter Dayan, who in 2017 received a Brain Prize for identifying how RL principles explain the workings of the dopamine system in the brain and its implications for human decision-making and its disorders.
CS With Impact, the largest expansion in Brown CS history, has added five new faculty members this spring:
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)") …
Brown CS is mourning the loss of our alum and friend, Isabel Cruz, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC)’s College of Engineering. She passed away on September 19, 2021, following unexpected complications from surgery. Her life partner, Brown Plastech Professor of Computer Science Roberto Tamassia, offers her biography and their shared story on his website, and he expresses his gratitude to Isabel’s many colleagues, mentees, and friends who have sent us their own memories of her, some of which we include below.
Every year, the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the EATCS Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC) award the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing to distinguished papers that have significantly impacted distributed computing's theory or practice. In 2022, Professor Maurice Herlihy of Brown CS and his collaborators have won the award, the Head of the Dijkstra Prize Committee writes, "for providing the first general approach to memory reclamation in nonblocking data structures, with significant impact both in research and practice".
Brown University's Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship is awarded each year to regular untenured members of the faculty who have achieved a record of excellence in teaching and scholarship during their first years at Brown. This year's winner, chosen by a faculty committee, is Professor Malte Schwarzkopf of Brown CS. The honor includes a semester of leave on special assignment at full compensation.
