Brown CS News

Every year, the Computing Research Assiciation (CRA) recognizes North American students who show phenomenal research potential with their Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, and for 2023-2024, four Brown CS students received honors: Megan Frisella (Finalist) and Anh Truong, Qiuhong Anna Wei, and Carolyn Zech (Honorable Mention).

On October 4, Maurice Herlihy of Brown CS gave a keynote address at the 25th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems, focusing on how it is necessary to rethink classical correctness conditions for distributed systems when dealing with cross-blockchain transactions.

Newcomers to the field of computer science who see it as more than just a ticket to a job at a big tech company have found a kindred spirit in Brown CS faculty member Michael Littman, who has just released Weird Computer Science, a new series of educational videos.

 

The latest cover story from Conduit, the Brown CS annual magazine, is an intimate look at a treasure trove of our department's history.

Now in its fifth year, the Brown CS Digital Archive (BCSDA) is a crowdsourced effort to curate items that have contributed to Brown CS history and preserve them permanently online, where they’ll be accessible to all. The vast majority of the BCSDA’s more than 400 artifacts (photos, graphics, audio, video, and even code) have been submitted by alum Paul Anagnostopoulos. In the pages below, Paul takes us behind the scenes, telling the story of developing the …

Almost twenty-five years ago, the Association for Women in Mathematics established the Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize, to be awarded to an undergraduate woman for excellence in mathematics. This year, Brown CS student Mattie Ji, a senior majoring in Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Computer Science, was the prize's runner-up.

At the recent conference, work ("Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4") from Brown CS PhD student Yong Zheng-Xin, postdoctoral researcher Cristina Menghini of Brown’s Data Science Institute, and Brown CS faculty member Stephen Bach was selected from 121 submissions to receive the workshop's Best Paper Award.

Late last year, Brown CS faculty member Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis won the Top Reviewer Award for his work as a program committee member for the 2023 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CSS), the 30th anniversary of the conference, which was held in Copenhagen, Denmark. This award is given annually to the most influential reviewers for work and service provided at CCS, which is ACM’s flagship conference on computer security.

 

We’re at a crucial moment, Brown CS University Professor Michael Littman believes, as the users and potentially the programmers of enormously powerful machines. In the face of doomsday artificial intelligence (AI) scenarios, algorithmic bias, and fears of job loss due to automation, he has a simple recommendation: we can get more happiness from our machines by telling them what our hearts desire. It’s the theme of his new book, Code to Joy, which was released earlier this year by The MIT Press.x

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) is the organization’s flagship conference in computer systems and widely considered one of the world’s two top venues in systems research. Every year, their Student Research Competition allows undergraduate and graduate students to showcase their work to the community, and this year, Brown CS student Artem Agvanian and alum Hannah Gross (now a doctoral student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology) won prizes for their work. 

Every year at the Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI), the Assocation for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) awards the AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator award, widely considered the highest honor in the field of AI education. This year's recipients were Brown CS faculty member Michael Littman and his longtime collaborator, Charles Isbell of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.