Brown CS

Eli Upfal And Co-Authors Win A STOC 30-Year Test Of Time Award

The Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), held since 1969, is widely considered one of the two most important conferences in the field of theory of computing. This year, a 1994 paper by Brown CS faculty member Eli Upfal received the conference’s 30-year Test of Time Award. His co-authors include Yossi Azar (Professor of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University), Andrei Z. Broder (Distinguished Scientist at Google), and Anna R. Karlin (Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle).

Learn more at Brown CS News: https://bit.ly/3AWrTUO

Brown CS Master’s Student Yumeng Ma Receives An NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Brown CS Master’s student Yumeng Ma (advised by Brown CS faculty member Jeff Huang) has just received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her work in human-computer interaction, specifically at the intersection of human-AI interaction and accessibility. The award is the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, and aims to recognize and support outstanding graduate students in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Learn more at Brown CS News: https://bit.ly/4g4zJf0

Mozilla Has Named Brown CS Alum Aaron Gokaslan A Rise25 Honoree For His Work In AI Accessibility

Annually, the Mozilla free software community recognizes 25 people who are leading the next wave of the internet with the Rise25 Awards, which were awarded in Dublin, Ireland, on August 13. Aaron Gokaslan, who received both his undergraduate and Master’s degrees in computer science with Brown CS and is currently a PhD student at Cornell University, was nominated and chosen as a Rise25 honoree for the 2024 cohort.

Learn more at Brown CS News: https://bit.ly/4dwzZBV

New work from Ian Gonsher and collaborators from Brown CS, Brown Engineering, and RISD presents a novel 3D display (Deep Surface Liquid Crystal Display, or DS-LCD) that uses layered transparent LCD screens in configuration and doesn't require the use of special glasses or other artifacts.

Watch a demo (https://vimeo.com/1000713357), read the paper (http://doi.org/10.54941/ahfe1005515), or vote for it as Brown's Innovation of the Year (https://tinyurl.com/5n95krme).

Randall Balestriero Joins Brown CS As Assistant Professor

This summer, Randall Balestriero has joined Brown CS as assistant professor. He’s one of the four latest hires in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, our largest expansion to date.

Visitors to Randall’s personal web page may find it somewhat atypical for a young academic, repeatedly required to self-promote. The first words that greet the viewer’s eye are a research area: Practical Deep Learning Theory. Randall’s name appears lower, in a sidebar.

The reasoning, he says, is less about humility than the importance of good science and his excitement for a rapidly-evolving field: “My website is about conveying my research, not my personal views. In a new field like AI, there’s a danger that if someone influential says that a particular direction is useless, new researchers might abandon it for no reason other than someone’s opinion. I want people to follow my proofs, my research, and make their own informed decisions.”

Learn more about Randall at Brown CS News: https://cs.brown.edu/news/2024/08/19/randall-balestriero-joins-brown-cs-assistant-professor

This past May, Brown CS students David Chen, Kazen Gallman, and a team of friends recreated a famous Tech House project from 2000 in which a game of Tetris was projected onto Brown’s Science Library. Full details of the massive effort, which includes what's believed to be the world's largest display of the game Snake, are available on their website: https://scilitetris.kazar4.com.

Vote to see one of our students, Nadia Bishop, at SXSW EDU 2025! Her session (“Developing Curriculum? Ask The Students First") will explore how to involve students in education design for more engaging and impactful learning. Cast your vote by 8/18:

PanelPicker | SXSW Conference & Festivals PanelPicker® is the official SXSW user-generated session proposal platform. Enter ideas and vote to help shape Conference programming for SXSW and SXSW EDU.

Deepti Raghavan Joins Brown CS As Assistant Professor

The word "hacking" recurs in conversation with Deepti Raghavan, who just finished her doctorate at Stanford University. Not "hacker", a statement of identity, but a course of action, a challenging and rewarding process of analysis and refinement.

“There’s something unique about low-level systems programming,” she says, “like my kernel-bypass work. I really enjoy understanding how to improve performance, looking at code, and asking myself if there’s some performance effect that I don’t understand. Building systems is fun, especially understanding exactly what is happening and why certain optimizations or algorithms help.”

This fall, Deepti joins Brown CS as assistant professor. She’s one of the four latest hires in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, our largest expansion to date.

Learn more at Brown CS News: https://cs.brown.edu/news/2024/08/12/deepti-raghavan-joins-brown-cs-assistant-professor/

Ritambhara Singh Gives A Keynote At The International Caparica Conference On Prescriptomics And Precision Medicine

On May 11, Brown CS faculty member Ritambhara Singh gave a keynote address at the 1st International Caparica Conference on Prescriptomics and Precision Medicine, a biomedical conference on safety for precision medicine, which in its first iteration, focused on how researchers can develop models that leverage the properties of different biological or clinical data types that should be integrated to make accurate diagnostic predictions. Prescriptomics is an emerging field focusing on the complex interplay within genetics and their impact on the effectiveness, safety, and response to precision medicine.

Learn more at Brown CS: https://bit.ly/3SMKSaF

Akshay Narayan Joins Brown CS As Assistant Professor

Akshay Narayan is skeptical of absolutes. A postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute, his work focuses on ways to make specialization for network environments accessible, and this fall, he joins Brown CS as assistant professor. He’s one of the four latest hires in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, our largest expansion to date.

Learn more at Brown CS News: https://cs.brown.edu/news/2024/08/05/akshay-narayan-joins-brown-cs-assistant-professor/

Ellie Pavlick Receives A Distinguished Named Chair

Brown CS is happy to announce that effective as of July 1, 2024, faculty member Ellie Pavlick has received a distinguished named chair. Formerly the Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science, she’s now the Briger Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Computer Science.

Learn more at Brown CS News: https://cs.brown.edu/news/2024/07/23/ellie-pavlick-receives-distinguished-named-chair/

Congratulations to Brown CS alum Fumeng Yang, who joins the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, as an assistant professor this fall: https://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/computer-science/news-events/news/articles/2024/northwestern-computer-science-postdocs-and-phd-students-secure-faculty-positions.html

Inside Higher Ed has a new story about an NSF pilot that aims to democratize AI research by connecting universities with industry supercomputers. It features Brown CS faculty member Suresh Venkatasubramanian (participating in the project by developing tools to bring more transparency to the data used to train LLMs) and Jennifer Wang, a Brown CS student who recently co-authored a paper on the AI-research divide for the Brookings Institution:

A pilot program gives academics access to supercomputers A pilot led by the National Science Foundation aims to democratize AI research by connecting universities with the supercomputers that big tech companies use.

Brown CS PhD Student Skyler Austen Transforms His Cybersecurity Passion Into An Educational Hackathon For Younger Students
For first-year PhD student Skyler Austen, cybersecurity education is the focus of his work with Brown CS under faculty member Kathi Fisler. Skyler took his research and, for the last few months, worked with a high school teacher from his home state of Arkansas, James Houston, to host a statewide hackathon for middle school students at the beginning of April.

Learn more at Brown CS News: https://bit.ly/3VIXIbv

Amy Greenwald And Brown CS Students Take Second Place In The International Automated Negotiation Agents Competition’s Supply Chain Management League

The International Automated Negotiation Agents Competition (ANAC) is now in its 15th iteration of bringing together researchers from the negotiation community and spawning novel research in the field of autonomous agent design. Most recently, it was held at the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Auckland, New Zealand, in May of 2024, where Brown CS students Arnie He and Akash Singirikonda secured second place in the competition’s Supply Chain Management League with faculty member Amy Greenwald as their coach.

Learn more at Brown CS: https://bit.ly/3XKo8uU

Brown CS Alum Michael Abela Receives A Fulbright Research Award

It’s never too late to make a change — just ask Michael Abela.

The Brown alum graduated in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. In the final semester of his senior year, just months before Commencement, Abela enrolled in a climate solutions course taught by Associate Provost for Sustainability Stephen Porder. To say it was influential is an understatement.

Learn more about his research at Brown CS News: https://cs.brown.edu/news/2024/06/29/brown-cs-alum-michael-abela-receives-fulbright-research-award/

Providence High School Students Interning With Stefanie Tellex Build And Fly Their Own Drones

Kiley Vasquez, a first-year student at the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center in Providence, has ambitious plans for her future. The 15-year-old has her sights set on two seemingly distinct fields: immigration law and marine biology.

"If I could find a way to do both," Vasquez said, "I would love that!"

So, how will the determined high schooler determine the best path to pursue?

Internships.

Read the whole story at Brown CS News: https://cs.brown.edu/news/2024/06/20/providence-high-school-students-interning-stefanie-tellex-build-and-fly-their-own-drones/

Maurice Herlihy Remembers His Teenage Work In Digital Humanities With His Pioneering Father, David Herlihy

Brown CS faculty member Maurice Herlihy is widely known for his work in practical and theoretical aspects of concurrent and distributed systems, but readers may be less familiar with one of his earliest research efforts. As a teenager, he traveled to Florence, Italy, where he helped his father, David Herlihy, on a project where he created punch cards based on data in the Florentine castato, or land registration system.

Learn more here at Brown CS News: http://bit.ly/4bUTKCC

FestivEli Celebrates Eli Upfal, His Career, And His Collaborations

Brown University’s Eli Upfal, Rush C. Hawkins Professor of Computer Science, turned seventy in 2024. To celebrate the occasion, four of his former PhD students invited his many collaborators and colleagues over the years to FestivEli, a series of talks and informal chats about the topics most dear to Eli, and where his contributions have been long-lasting and often trendsetting. Held on May 20-21, 2024, the organizers were Gopal Pandurangan (PhD ‘02, now Professor of Computer Science at the University of Houston, TX), Aris Anagnostopoulos (PhD ‘06, now Professor of Computer Engineering at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy), Matteo Riondato (PhD ‘14, now Associate Professor of Computer Science at Amherst College, MA), and Lorenzo De Stefani (PhD ‘20, now Lecturer of Computer Science at Brown), with support from Brown CS Administration and Finance Manager Lisa Manekofsky.

Learn more at Brown CS News: https://cs.brown.edu/news/2024/06/06/festiveli-celebrates-eli-upfal-his-career-and-his-collaborations

Malte Schwarzkopf And Ritambhara Singh Receive Named Professorships

Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) is pleased to announce that pending the anticipated approval of Brown’s Corporation, faculty members Malte Schwarzkopf and Ritambhara Singh (also of Brown’s Data Science Institute and Center for Computational Molecular Biology) will receive named professorships. Effective July 1, 2024, Malte will be the Eliot Horowitz ‘03 Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Ritambhara will be the John E. Savage Assistant Professor in Computer Science.

Learn more at Brown CS News: https://cs.brown.edu/news/2024/05/24/malte-schwarzkopf-and-ritambhara-singh-receive-named-professorships