In an email to the Brown CS community on December 10, Department Chair Ugur Çetintemel announced that AStaff member Lauren Clarke will become the new Brown CS Department Manager, effective as of January 1, 2022. Lauren has been on the Department of Computer Science staff since 2004 and served as Academic and Industry Partners Program (IPP) Manager since 2013. In her current role, she’s responsible for managing the Brown CS PhD program, coordinating course offerings, managing the IPP, and supervising some members of AStaff, among other tasks.
“This department changes pretty much every time you turn around,” remembers Jane McIlmail, who is retiring as Department Manager after fourteen years with Brown CS. “Partly it’s the field, but partly it’s the energy and vision of our faculty and our wonderful students. I’ll miss it all. I love the little things, like the Halloween party and seeing everyone’s kids in costume, and I love when our people get recognized. I’m a geek, so seeing things like a faculty member being named to a professional society is exciting to me.”
Today, Brown University's Department of Computer Science announced that thanks to a new initiative, its Master of Science in Computer Science program will be accessible to a number of students who otherwise might not have been able to participate. Beginning with the Fall, 2022 semester, Brown CS will make available a small number of merit-based, full-tuition scholarships to support the Department's diversity and inclusion goals. All admitted applicants will be automatically considered for them, with no additional application needed.
NeurIPS, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, is a multi-track interdisciplinary annual meeting that includes invited talks, demonstrations, symposia, and oral and poster presentations of refereed papers. This year, new research (“On the Expressivity of Markov Reward”) by Brown CS alums David Abel and Mark K. Ho (now at DeepMind and Princeton University, respectively), Professor Michael Littman, and their collaborators, Will Dabney, Anna Harutyunyan, Doina Precup, and Satinder Singh (all at DeepMind) has earned one of the event’s highest honors, the Outstanding Paper Award.
In addition to other accolades, Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi of Brown CS has been repeatedly recognized in 2021 for his contributions as a reviewer. Koli Calling is one of the leading international conferences dedicated to the exchange of research and practice relevant to the scholarship of teaching and learning and to education research in the computing disciplines. This month, they named Shriram one of four Superb Reviewers who offered consistently excellent feedback to authors and made significant contributions to the discussion. His fellow awardees are Paul Denny (University of Auckland), Stephen Edwards (Virginia Tech), and Juho Leinonen (University of Helsinki).
My name is Madeline Greenberg and I am the Project Manager for ‘Choreorobotics 0101’ – the first course to be cross-listed across the TAPS and CS departments. I have been organizing the Choreorobotics Initiative at Brown for the past 6 months, corralling teams of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff as we work to develop the course’s curriculum.
Choreorobotics is novel. What that means is that we don’t know what we’re doing. We are each experts, incredibly competent and hard working in various fields including but not limited to choreographics and robotics, but we’re entirely making this up as …
"Computer systems are the backbone of modern applications," says Brown CS Professor Malte Schwarzkopf, "and the science of building efficient, easy-to-use, and trustworthy computer systems is about discovering key ideas that help make people get more out of their computers. Great ideas in systems have had stunning practical impact on the industry. But systems research, like much of CS research in general, suffers from a lack of diversity: only a handful of papers in the top systems conferences have non-male lead authors."
However, a change may be coming. Thanks to an exploreCSR award from Google, Malte is leading a team …
My name is Megan and I belong to a weird cohort of highly-specific nerds who are artists but also techies but also care about humanity but also think about the philosophical and ethical implications of their work. I am a professional dancer/choreographer who is finishing up a Master's in computer science. Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to bridge the gap between dance and computer science in a variety of projects – using a Kinect sensor and Unity to make a really hacky version of Just Dance, building a 3D convolutional neural network to recognize tap dance steps …
This report was part of the Rhode Island Data Journalism Project and has been reprinted with kind permission from The Public's Radio. For other news stories, visit https://thepublicsradio.org, download their apps, or tune your radio to 89.3 FM.
Rhodes Technologies and Rhodes Pharmaceuticals, subsidiaries of Purdue Pharma, produced pills and raw opioid ingredients out of a factory complex in Coventry.
by Hal Triedman
Since 2003, Bill Muzzy has lived on Pulaski Street in Coventry, Rhode Island, right next door to a factory compound. Like many of his neighbors, Muzzy knew that the compound made pharmaceutical ingredients. But he …
Multiple members of the Brown CS community have returned from the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) with two honors for their work. Brown CS alums Sarah Bawabe and Laura Wilson, students Tongyu Zhou and Ezra Marks, and Professor Jeff Huang’s paper (“The UX Factor: Using Comparative Peer Review to Evaluate Designs through User Preferences”) has received an Honorable Mention as well as an Impact Recognition Award.
