Brown CS News

This fall, Peihan Miao joins Brown CS as assistant professor. She’s the latest hire in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, our largest expansion to date. She specializes in cryptography and security with a focus on secure multi-party computation (MPC).

This Friday, Professor Michael Littman of Brown CS won the John McCarthy Award from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization (IJCAI). The award, which is the top research honor in AI for mid-career scientists, recognizes researchers who have consistently made significant and influential contributions to the field.
In conferring the award, IJCAI cited Michael’s role in developing reinforcement learning and AI planning in partially observable systems, as well as his work in formalized state abstractions.
 

Nikos Vasilakis, who joins Brown CS as Assistant Professor this fall, says that the desire to create the greatest positive impact for as many people as possible has always informed his research, teaching, and his broader efforts. He’s the latest hire in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, the largest Brown CS expansion to date.

The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) announced in late June that Professor Carsten Eickhoff has been elected Treasurer of their Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) for the 2022-2025 term. Carsten, who heads the AI Lab at Brown’s Center for Biomedical Informatics and holds a courtesy appointment with Brown CS, began his role July 1.

Ellis is the most recent hire in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, the largest expansion in Brown CS history. He recently earned his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, and after he completes postdoctoral work at ETH Zürich, he’ll return to the department in the autumn of 2023 as assistant professor. 

Brown University’s Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) is pleased to announce that four of its faculty members — Ugur Çetintemel, Michael Littman, Carsten Eickhoff, and James Tompkin — received named chairs at the May, 2022 meeting of the Corporation of Brown University. James is the John E. Savage Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Michael is the University Professor of Computer Science, and Ugur is the Khosrowshahi University Professor of Computer Science. Carsten, who has a courtesy appointment with Brown CS, was appointed the Manning Assistant Professor of Medical Science.

Last month, MongoDB announced a new feature called “Queryable Encryption” that it says is a major step forward in the realm of data security. This feature will make MongoDB, which was co-founded by Brown CS alum Eliot Horowitz, the first company to enable users to search a database while the data itself remains encrypted, preventing malicious parties from accessing it.

After working hard to make computer science part of his high school courseload, a young Nick DeMarinis was thrilled to end up in an advanced placement CS course in his senior year with a “really kind of eccentric” teacher at the helm. Nick is the most recent hire in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, the largest expansion in Brown CS history. Having successfully defended his doctoral thesis last September, he’s returning to the department this July as lecturer. 

At last month's Commencement ceremony, Brown CS presented diplomas to 366 undergraduate students, 21.8% of all the undergraduates who graduated from Brown this May. It's the highest number of graduations ever from a single department or school at Brown, and just as it’s been for the last six years, Computer Science is the most popular concentration on campus.

This week, Brown University hosts the Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM), bringing over 500 of the field’s thought leaders to Providence and demonstrating Brown’s continued status as one of the world’s leading centers for reinforcement learning (RL) research and study. Attendees will include the field's founders, Andy Barto and Rich Sutton, and many others who have made seminal contributions, including Peter Dayan, who in 2017 received a Brain Prize for identifying how RL principles explain the workings of the dopamine system in the brain and its implications for human decision-making and its disorders.