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Thinking about Tom, and our work together in the Department, several passionate themes come to mind – so many that I’ve only been able to write them at this final moment.

As the latest step in a career that’s ranged from the Marine Corps to the Department of Energy to serving as Federal Cybersecurity Lead and Senior Cybersecurity Advisor to the White House’s Federal Chief Information Officer, Brown CS Master of Science in Cybersecurity alum Nicholas (Nick) M. Andersen has taken on a prominent new role.

This summer, on a grant from Brown's Startup Fellowship program, Eric Xia developed www.word.golf with Julian Beaudry, a fellow CS undergraduate. They've done their best to follow a spirit of inquiry, creating a project which challenges the imagination while retaining a sense of familiarity and playfulness.

I was one of 26 Brown students among the 2,500 invited to the Y Combinator AI Startup School. Engulfing an entire warehouse in San Francisco, the event featured incredible speakers, leaving me with new insights about Silicon Valley and Brown’s unique elements and the future of AI ventures.

Brown University doctoral student Zainab Iftikhar is the friend people turn to when they need to talk. 

“My family jokes that I’m the ‘therapist friend’ everyone calls when they have a problem,” Iftikhar said. 

Her capacity for caregiving has informed her research at Brown, where she is focused on exploring technology’s therapeutic strengths and weaknesses to find ways people can best use AI to support social and mental health. Her research has spotlighted humans’ inherent ability to offer and detect empathy, which is something that chatbots, text-based therapists and other artificial intelligence systems don’t do well, she said. 

Will artificial intelligence cure disease or hasten environmental disaster, free us from drudgery or drown us in slop? What’s next for AI, and what role does Brown have to play? With nuance, in depth, with a bit of humor and without a lot of hype, Michael Littman would like to tell you all about it. 

Our new issue is here! This year's cover story takes a look at the future of AI at Brown and beyond with Michael Littman, Brown's inaugural Associate Provost for Artificial Intelligence, as your guide. Other stories highlight student research and entrepreneurship, including responsible AI, a visit to a startup school, and an online game that explores our understanding of language. Finally, we offer detailed retrospectives as we bid farewell to Kathy Kirman Billings, Tom Doeppner, Steve Reiss, Don Stanford, and Stan Zdonik. Best wishes for a healthy and happy holiday season!

Vasilis received a Top Reviewer Award and the group’s paper (“PickleBall: Secure Deserialization of Pickle-based Machine Learning Models”) received one of five Distinguished Artifact Awards. 

Brown CS faculty members Serena Booth and Suresh Venkatasubramanian have just been appointed to co-chair the AI and Algorithms Subcommittee, whose recent work includes responses to government RFIs, techbriefs, and statements on chatbot use.

ARIA, a Brown-based research consortium supported by a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation, welcomed scientists from across the U.S. to kick off a five-year program with a launch event in Providence.