Brown CS News

Associate Professor Chad Jenkins has been named a 2013 National Geographic Emerging Explorer. National Geographic's Emerging Explorers Program recognizes and supports the uniquely gifted and inspiring who are at the beginning of a promising career in exploration and whose recent accomplishments show a potential for future breakthroughs.

“I am thrilled to join the 2013 class of National Geographic Emerging Explorers,” stated Jenkins. “Such recognition would not be possible without the supportive environment of Brown CS to truly explore new areas of research beyond common conventions.  My hope is that Human-Robot Interaction will have the same level of impact on ...

Yudi Fu and Douglas McErlean received honorable mentions from the 2013 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers Award program. The program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.

Yudi Fu works in Professor Andy van Dam’s Graphics Lab on the creation of three distinct generations of a touch-centric art viewing project: Garibaldi, Large Artwork Display on the Surface (LADS) and Touch Art Gallery (TAG), designed for museum curators to create and display digital artworks on (large) touch screens. Besides the user-centered design, Yudi is also responsible for the ...

The Second Human-Robot Interaction Symposium, to further define and develop the HRI Initiative at Brown, was held at ICERM on May 6, 2013. The symposium was organized by Computer Science faculty Chad Jenkins and Michael Littman along with CLPS professor Bertram Malle, and was sponsored by the Department of Computer Science, the Office of the Provost, and the Office of the Vice President for Research.

"Robotics is poised to be a game changing technology, which will change society over the next 40 years the way computing changed society in the last 40 years,” said Chad Jenkins. “Brown is in a ...

Jeff’s research seeks to understand user interactions to drive new applications at the intersection of human-computer interaction and information retrieval. Jeff expects to receive his Ph.D. in Information Science in June 2013 from the University of Washington at Seattle under the guidance of Professor Susan Dumais. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jeff is a 2012-2013 Facebook Fellowship recipient and was a Google Research Award ...

Anna Lysyanskaya

Anna Lysyanskaya was recently awarded a Google Faculty Research Award in the amount of $43,000 to fund research on the applications of cryptography in the cloud to obtain a single password.

The funding will be used study password-authenticated secret sharing that allows users to distribute data among several servers so that the data can be recovered using a single human-memorizable password. No single server (or even no group of servers up to a certain size) can mount an off-line dictionary attack on the password or learn anything about the data. This is because no server possesses the ...

Maurice Herlihy, a computer science professor at Brown University, has been named the 2013 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s prestigious W. Wallace McDowell Award for his contributions to multiprocessor computation.

Herlihy, whose research focuses on practical and theoretical aspects of concurrent and distributed computing, was recognized for his “fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of multi-processor computation.” His early work on wait-free synchronization showed that different synchronization operations have different computational power, but that any operation that can solve consensus is universal.

The McDowell Award is given to individuals for outstanding recent theoretical, design, educational, practical, or ...

Maurice Herlihy , professor of computer science, has been named a member of the National Academy of Engineering . Herlihy was honored for his work on concurrent computing techniques for linearizability, nonblocking data structures, and transactional memory . Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature,” and to the “pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

The Department is delighted to announce the addition of Stefanie Tellex to the faculty roster as an assistant professor, starting in the fall semester.

“We are very excited to welcome Stefanie to the department,” said Chair Roberto Tamassia. “She has outstanding creativity and unbounded energy. Her expertise in robotics and natural language understanding is highly synergistic with our strategic research priorities and we look forward to her leading new interdisciplinary projects.”

Eugene Charniak added, “I think it is great that Stefanie is coming to Brown.  Her research area (human-robot communication) is exciting, and her approach (graphical models) is exactly right ...