When I joined Brown CS as a communications and outreach specialist eight years ago, most of what I initially encountered was reassuringly as I’d expected. Coffee consumption was as high or higher than I’d seen in the tech sector. One of the legends of the field was lecturing in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. There was an entire mailing list devoted to a thriving board game culture.
But one of the first emails I received was more of a surprise. Written by a Brown CS alum, it was less of a lament for the past and more of a critique …
Brown CS alum Guillaume Marceau, Professor Kathi Fisler, and Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi have just received the Onward! 2011 Most Notable Paper Award. This honor is given annually to the authors of a paper that was presented at the Onward! conference, an international event focusing on everything to do with programming and software. The papers are judged based on the influence they have had and their impact over the last ten years.
Each year, Cadence, a computational software company focusing on tools for electronic design automation, awards its Women in Technology Scholarship to support and celebrate young women who are starting their careers. Recently, Brown CS student Sreshtaa Rajesh was declared one of the winners, earning a $5,000 stipend. "Your impressive academic achievements, professor recommendations, and drive to shape the future of technology set you apart from the many talented women we considered," writes Academic Network Program Manager Mallory Clemons of Cadence. "We are excited for what the future holds for you and the impact you will make in technology."
Making the most of opportunities for entrepreneurship support at Brown, four undergraduates combined their distinctive skills, talents and experiences to change how health care is provided to vulnerable patients.
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).
"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 …
