Brown CS News

"Here we are," said Brown CS Professor Andries "Andy" van Dam in 1987, "and we have to ask, perhaps rhetorically, has hypertext arrived?" He was delivering a keynote address at the first ACM Hypertext Conference (text available here) in which he credited visionaries Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson, reviewed Brown's hypertext experiments to date, and …

Computer science that benefits humanity, science that’s grounded in an awareness of its societal impact, has long been a Brown CS hallmark. Today, more than forty years after the founding of the department, global concern about the ethical and societal issues surrounding computing is greater than ever. This semester brings …

This year's ACM SIGMOD (Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data) conference was held in Amsterdam, and members of the Brown CS community returned from the event with two notable awards. PhD candidates Philipp Eichmann, Franco Solleza, and Junjay Tan; alum Nesime Tatbul; and Professor Stan Zdonik received the Best Demonstration Award and alums Nathaniel Weir and …

Nishanth Kumar is an Undergraduate Research Assistant in Brown CS Professor Stefanie Tellex's Humans 2 Robots Lab whose interests include robotics, artificial intelligence, and using hardware and software to create truly useful products. Last semester, he was selected as a Plenary Speaker for the Ivy League Undergraduate Research Symposium (ILURS) 2019 for his …

Professor Jeff Huang of Brown CS has just won an Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, which is given to support the research and encourage the careers of outstanding young university faculty members. Jeff's Brown HCI research group focuses on behavior-powered systems, and their goal is to invent new, personalized applications from remotely-captured …

"Computer science education," says Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi of Brown CS, "is a difficult and fascinating problem, sitting at the intersection of the technical and human." In a recent plenary talk ("The Role of Computer Science in Computer Science Education") on June 26 at ACM FCRC, he showed how solving even seemingly simple …

Professor Sohini Ramachandran of Brown University's Center for Computational Molecular Biology (she also serves as its Director) and Department of Computer Science has just received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Sohini's Ramachandran Group of researchers addresses problems in population genetics and evolutionary theory, generally using humans as a study system. Their work uses mathematical modeling, applied …

"In today's security environment," says Professor Seny Kamara of Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS), "we believe it's necessary to have systems that fully encrypt the user's data at every point in its life cycle." He's talking about end-to-end encryption, the focus of his Encrypted Systems Lab and new startup Aroki Systems. Last year, the …