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Brown CS has been mourning the loss of our colleague and friend, Rosemary Simpson, who was a valued member of Andy van Dam’s research group and a fixture in the halls of the CIT for more than twenty-five years. She passed away in late 2022. 

The need for exploit mitigations is more critical than ever,” says Brown CS faculty member Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis, “and even more so when it comes to critical infrastructure. Despite years of research, software hardening still revolves around a ‘protect everything, the same way, all the time, at the same intensity’ approach that works well only with defenses that have negligible performance overhead and are oblivious to the settings in which the hardened software is used.”

 

The Randy F. Pausch '82 Computer Science Undergraduate Summer Research Award, given this year to Anh Truong and Qiuhong Anna Wei to support their work with Brown CS faculty members Daniel Ritchie and Srinath Sridhar, respectively, recognizes strong achievement from undergraduate researchers and offers them the opportunity to continue their work over the summer.

Last week, Brown CS faculty member Kathi Fisler was an invited panelist at Stanford University's inaugural Embedded Ethics Conference, which offered broad discussions applicable to creating effective ethics education programs, covering the full life cycle of program creation, development, and implementation. Panelists from different universities addressed creating new ethics initiatives and how to structure a successful program once this is done, while instructors presented live teaching demonstrations and ethics curricula.

Late last year, the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director announced that Brown CS alum Nick Leiserson is the new Assistant National Cyber Director for Cyber Policy and Programs, serving under National Cyber Director Chris Inglis. By statute, their office serves as the primary advisor to the Biden-Harris administration on cybersecurity policy and incident response and works with national departments and agencies to implement national cybersecurity strategy.

Speaking before a U.S. Senate committee on the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence, computer scientist Suresh Venkatasubramanian urged lawmakers to establish regulations to govern AI-based systems.

60 Minutes, America’s oldest and most-watched television newsmagazine, turned their attention this week to some of the problems surrounding ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence chatbot that’s been trained with massive amounts of internet text. For expert commentary, they chose Ellie Pavlick, Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University.

The CS Department recognizes the decision of our undergraduate teaching assistants to form a union. We will work in good faith around the important matters of terms and conditions of employment for the members of the bargaining unit. We remain fully committed to our UTA program and to ensuring that it is a valuable academic experience for generations of students to come.

On Tuesday, February 7, the Brown faculty voted in favor of creating a Brown Data Science Institute, building on the Data Science Initiative that was created here in 2016. On Friday, DSI Director Sohini Ramachandran presented the proposal to the Corporation, who approved the faculty’s recommendation.

As hosts of new AI-powered chatbots and technology become widely available, and questions surface on their limits and power, Brown scholar Michael Littman offers insights into a debate that will only grow louder.