Brown CS News

Thanks to the popularity of new AI-powered chatbots and technology, Brown alumni Aaron Gokaslan and Vanya Cohen are seeing newfound interest in their dataset replicating OpenAI’s language processing model GPT-2.

This year, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation Pandemic Response Policy Research Fund is providing $226,536 to support four Brown University research projects that will help policymakers, health officials, educators, and community leaders understand and address critical lessons learned from COVID-19. One of them (“Privacy-Preserving Digital Health Certificates”), led by Brown CS faculty member Anna Lysyanskaya, will explore using privacy-preserving authentication algorithms in digital vaccine credentials.

A new project ("Learning Implicit Structured Neural Network Representation by Watching and Listening to Astronaut Spacewalk Videos") by Brown CS faculty member Chen Sun has just received a Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award. This honor, given annually by Brown University’s Office of the Vice President for Research, was established to support excellence in scholarly work by providing funding for selected faculty research projects of exceptional merit, with preference given to junior faculty in the process of building their research portfolio.

Developed in 1994 by Turing Award winner Jim Gray, Sort Benchmark is an annual competition in which researchers attempt to rapidly sort a terabyte of data. Brown CS alum Ani Kristo, now at Meta, and Adjunct Associate Professor Tim Kraska, now at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with collaborator Padmanabhan S. Pillai of Intel Labs, have recently won the contest’s top prize in the JouleSort Indy category, which measures energy efficiency, using a Learned Sorting algorithm. Their implementation, ELSAR, showed that one can sort a terabyte using 62,912 (+/- 372) joules with a runtime of 618.1 (+/- 5) seconds on …

A team of researchers, including Brown planetary scientist Jim Head, propose using the James Webb Space Telescope to look at five planets in the Venus Zone, a search that could reveal valuable insights into Earth’s future.

Last month, Brown CS faculty member George Konidaris joined with five other artificial intelligence thought leaders in his home country of South Africa to found a commercial AI lab that may be the first of its kind: Lelapa AI. Lelapa's goal is to reverse the brain drain by enticing African AI researchers to return to the continent, and to use their talents to produce socially-grounded, Africa-centric AI for the benefit of the global south, which contains more than 85% of the world's population. Lelapa is built on three primary intentions: wisdom (in particular, Africa's niche skills in resource efficiency), family …

Brown CS faculty member Yu Cheng, the department’s new ICPC coach, is himself a prior ICPC World Finalist. On February 25, he brought twelve students to the ICPC’s 2022 Northeast North America (NENA) Regional Contest at the College of the Holy Cross site: one team ranked sixth, earning one of four silver medals, and advanced to the North America Championship (NAC), to be held at the University of Central Florida in May. Their competitors will include teams from 50 universities from the United States and Canada that advanced to the NAC from one of the 11 North America Regional Contests, …

Our most significant lecture of the year honors Paris Kanellakis, a distinguished computer scientist who was an esteemed and beloved member of Brown CS. Paris joined us in 1981 and became a full professor in 1990. His research area was theoretical computer science, with an emphasis on the principles of database systems, logic in computer science, the principles of distributed computing, and combinatorial optimization.

Brown CS has been mourning the loss of our colleague and friend, Rosemary Simpson, who was a valued member of Andy van Dam’s research group and a fixture in the halls of the CIT for more than twenty-five years. She passed away in late 2022.