Brown CS News

Last year, Brown announced the founding of the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination and Redesign (CNTR), whose mission is to redefine computer science education, research, and technology to center the needs, problems, and aspirations of all, especially those that technology has left behind.

Over the weekend of October 5, three Brown CS undergraduates, Noah Kim, Sean Kim, and Eric Yoon, won first place in the Healthcare Track at Yale University’s annual hackathon, dubbed YHack, with their personal project fueled by artificial intelligence.

The Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Lecture honors a distinguished computer scientist who was an esteemed and beloved member of the Brown CS community. Paris came to Brown in 1981 and became a full professor in 1990. Last week, Virginia Vassilevska Williams of MIT delivered the twenty-fourth annual Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Lecture: “A Fine-Grained Approach to Algorithms and Complexity”.

Michael Littman, University Professor of Computer Science, has been appointed as Brown University’s first Associate Provost for Artificial Intelligence (APAI), a newly established leadership position with a campus-wide charge to advance, in a responsible manner, Brown’s engagement with AI across its academic missions.

Second year PhD student Rui-Jie Yew was recently recognized as a runner-up for Best Student Paper at the Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) Conference in San Jose at the end of October.

Brown CS PhD student Tongyu Zhou was recently selected for the annual Rising Stars workshop, a program hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science that recognizes underrepresented PhD students and postdocs, especially those who could potentially become faculty members in the coming years. 

Serena Booth earned a doctorate in CS at MIT in 2023 and currently works in the U.S. Senate as an AAAS AI Policy Fellow. In the fall of 2025, she’ll join Brown CS as assistant professor. Serena is one of the four latest hires in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, our largest expansion to date.

Brown CS faculty member Ernesto Zaldivar was recently selected to join the Army Cyber Institute (ACI) at West Point as a Cyber Law, Policy, and Strategy Non-Resident Fellow. The ACI bridges the public and private sectors to explore challenges through multiple disciplines, engaging military, government, academic, and industrial cyber communities through partnerships to enable effective Army operations throughout cyberspace. Some topics that the ACI researches include cyberspace operations, electromagnetic warfare, and cyber law and policy.

In a testament to Brown’s tradition of leadership in computer security for 2.5 decades, members of the Brown CS community co-authored 14 of the conference’s accepted papers, served as 7 members of its Program Committee, and were recognized as one of its Distinguished Reviewers. 

Ellie and her collaborators are conducting new research to enable us to understand and control so-called “black box” AI by creating tools that inspect, diagnose, and manipulate high-level algorithms.