Posts

Today, we begin a project to highlight the wide-ranging and innovative research of our PhD students as they prepare to leave Brown CS. Our first contributor, Ryan Cabeen, discusses his work below. To see other PhD research overviews, click here. What is the structure of the neural circuitry of the brain?  How does …

"We want to bring computing to all, but which all do we mean?" ask Kathi Fisler, Shriram Krishnamurthi, and Emmanuel Schanzer, co-directors of Bootstrap, one of the nation's leading computer science literacy programs, in a recent BLOG@CACM post. "There’s one natural interpretation —probably the one imagined by most of the general public— which is that 'all' means 'all students.' Unfortunately, …

Bootstrap, one of the nation's leading computer science literacy programs, co-directed by Brown CS faculty members Shriram Krishnamurthi and Kathi Fisler (adjunct), continues to extend its reach. Bootstrap has just announced a partnership to use its approach to building systems to teach modeling in physics, an important component of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). This project is a collaboration with …

Billed as one of the "hottest sessions" of NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference, the year's largest event for graphics processing unit developers, a presentation by VR Lab Manager Tom Sgouros (brace yourself for a pun) was a uniquely behind-the-scenes look at a major technological accomplishment. "Only Where It Yurts" walked attendees through the 20 computers, …

by Kevin Stacey (Science News Officer, Physical Sciences)PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — National Science Foundation Director France Córdova and U.S. Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island joined students, faculty and administrators at Brown on April 8 for a firsthand look at some of the NSF-supported research happening at the University.The visit …

PhD Candidate David Abel of Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) has just been selected from a highly competitive pool of students to join the fifth cohort of the Open Graduate Education program. "The formal tools of CS can help ground age-old philosophical questions, while philosophy can bring unique methods …

Email encryption has been available for more than two decades, but providing the layperson with access to secure email (now much in demand in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations) has proven difficult. How will it work? Despite multiple years of effort from Yahoo, Google, and others, various issues, …

As the field of robotics begins to make serious headway with the challenge of robotic grasping, Professor Stefanie Tellex's Humans to Robots Laboratory (H2R) at Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) continues to draw attention. In a recent IEEE Spectrum article, Sergey Levine of Google mentions the "substantially broader …

"Stunned silence" is how Professor Anna Lysyanskaya of Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) describes the reaction to a recent speech by President Barack Obama at the South by Southwest Conferences and Festivals (SXSW). In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, she comments on the consensus among cryptologists that secure encryption …

In trying times, perhaps one of the most substantial contributions that academics can offer is to use their position of unbiased knowledge to propose reasoned solutions to global crises. In the wake of recent atrocities in Brussels, Timothy Edgar, a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, has done just that, recommending in Lawfare that …