Distinguished Lecture Series

Launched in 2008, this series features prominent computer scientists from academia and industry addressing topics of broad interest. Distinguished Lectures enrich Brown's academic environment by contributing to the education of our students, motivating our undergraduates to get involved in research, and bringing together students, faculty, alums, and industry partners for lively interaction and discussion.

Upcoming Distinguished Lectures

Our next distinguished lecture will appear here when ready.

Previous Distinguished Lectures

Click the title of a Distinguished Lecture to learn more about it, including (in some cases) recordings and other items.

Date Topic Speaker
11/17/2019 Collaboration as a Lens for Inclusive Technical Innovation Meredith Ringel Morris (Microsoft Research)
04/18/2019 Building Machines That Learn And Think Like People Josh Tenenbaum (MIT)
10/03/2018 AI and Security: Lessons, Challenges and Future Directions Dawn Song (UC Berkeley)
09/26/2018 Hitting the Nail on the Head: Interdisciplinary Research in Computer Networking Jennifer Rexford (Princeton University)
02/08/2018

Rethinking Ubiquitous Computing to Transform Healthcare

Elizabeth Mynatt (Georgia Tech)
11/30/2017 Case Studies from the Real World: The Importance of Measurement and Analysis in Building Better Systems Bianca Schroeder (University of Toronto)

10/15/2015

Personalized Search: Potential and Pitfalls

Susan Dumais (Microsoft)

10/06/2015

Accelerating the Discovery of Insights from Data

Laura Haas (IBM)

03/05/2015

Customizing Robots

Daniela Rus (MIT)

02/12/2015

Games, Learning, and the Price of Anarchy

Eva Tardos (Cornell)

12/08/2014

A Surprising Application of Differential Privacy

Cynthia Dwork (Microsoft)

11/06/2014

The Power of Abstraction

Barbara Liskov (MIT)

05/01/2014

Towards Theoretical Models of Natural Inputs: Aiming to Bridge the Theory/AI Divide

Avrim Blum (Carnegie Mellon)

03/13/2014

Small, n=me, data

Deborah Estrin (Cornell)

02/20/2014

Never-Ending Machine Learning

Tom M Mitchell (Carnegie Mellon)

02/06/2014

Trustworthy Hardened Code

Greg Morrisett (Harvard)

04/18/2013

Reflections on Image-Based Modeling and Rendering

Richard Szeliski (Microsoft)

04/11/2013

Language Translation as Codebreaking

Kevin Knight (USC)

02/21/2013

A Software Crisis? Please, sir, may I have some more?Abstract

David Notkin (University of Washington)

05/05/2011

CALM Consistency: Disorderly Programming in Bloom

Joseph Hellerstein (Berkeley)

11/10/2011

Provenance Everywhere

Margo Seltzer (Harvard)

10/01/2011

Statistics and Computation in the Age of Massive Data

Michael Jordan (Berkeley)

09/08/2011

Algorithms, Graph Theory, and the Solution of Laplacian Linear Equations

Daniel Spielman (Yale)

11/18/2010

Meaning Propagation

Fernando Pereira (Google)

11/04/2010

Computational Cameras: Redfining the Image

Shree Nayar (Columbia)

09/23/2010

Strong LP Formulations and Primal-Dual Approximation Algorithms

David Shmoys (Cornell)

04/22/2010

Theory and Applications of an Algorithm for Playing Repeated Games

Rob Schapire (Princeton)

04/19/2010

Computational Thinking

Jeannette Wing (NSF)

04/08/2010

Interdisciplinarity in the Age of Networks

Jennifer Tour Chayes (Microsoft)

03/11/2010

An Evolution of General Purpose Processing: Reconfigurable Logic Computing

Joel Emer (Intel)

03/04/2010

Information Integration: From Clio to Integration Independence

Renee Miller (University of Toronto)

10/29/2009

Efficiently Learning to Behave Efficiently

Michael Littman (Rutgers University)

10/20/2009

Randomized Shellsort: A Simple Oblivious Sorting

Michael Goodrich (University of California at Irvine)

04/29/2009

Cyberspace- Taming the Wild West

John Savage (Brown)

04/29/2009

Probabilistic Models for Complex Systems: From Cells to Bodies

Daphne Koller (Stanford)

02/26/2009

Approximation Algorithms

Michel Goemans (MIT)

10/16/2008

Simplicity is Complex

John Maeda (President of RISD)

09/25/2008

Simple Techniques for Eliminating Fatal Errors in Software Systems

Martin Rinard (MIT)