Brown CS News

Brown CS has been mourning the loss of our colleague and friend, Katrina Avery, known to many of our alums through her service of more than twenty-five years as Department Manager. She passed away late last year and her husband, Brown CS Professor Tom Doeppner, shares the memorial below.

Brown CS Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian has just ended a 15-month appointment as advisor to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and The Brown Daily Herald's Jakobi Haskellhas just interviewed him about his work on the country's first blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which was released by the White House earlier this month.

At Brown CS and around the globe, interest in AI and related topics is soaring. CSCI 1470 Deep Learning, only a few years old, today has an enrollment of over 200 students. But as computer scientists hope to expand the field to historically underrepresented groups (HUGs), students from demographics that have born the brunt of algorithmic bias and deepfakes may be understandably hesitant to take part. exploreCSR: Socially-Responsible AI for Computational Creativity, a partnership between Brown CS and Google Research, aims to change that.

The Department of Computer Science at Brown University is hiring multiple tenure-track faculty members at the level of Assistant Professor and a faculty position at the rank of lecturer, senior lecturer, or distinguished senior lecturer.

Brown CS is glad to announce that applications are open for the Randy F. Pausch '82 Computer Science Undergraduate Summer Research Award, which provides $10,000 annually to support an undergraduate engaged in an intensive faculty-student summer research partnership with the Department of Computer Science. 

Suresh Venkatasubramanian served as a White House advisor for the nation’s first “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” helping to develop a guide to ethical practices in an era of data-driven technologies.

Tassallah Amina Abdullahi, a second-year doctoral student in Computer Science, has won a highly competitive Computational and Data Science Fellowship from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (ACM SIGHPC). She is one of eleven fellowship winners for 2022 in the international competition, which is intended to increase the diversity of students pursuing graduate degrees in data science and computational science, including women and students from racial/ethnic backgrounds that have not traditionally participated in the computing field.       

The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications announced earlier this summer that a paper by Brown CS Professor Theophilus A. Benson won their 2022 Test of Time Award. The paper, “Network traffic characteristics of data centers in the wild,” was written by Theophilus, Aditya Akella of UT Austin, and David A. Maltz of Microsoft Research. Bestowed annually, the award recognizes 10- to 12-year-old papers published in sponsored or co-sponsored conferences that remain relevant and valuable in the present.

After an unmatched eight years as Brown CS Department Chair, Khosrowshahi University Professor of Computer Science Ugur Çetintemel stepped down at the end of June, with Professor Roberto Tamassia now succeeding him. “It has been an extraordinary experience and an honor to serve as the head of this amazing department,” Ugur tells us. 

Last year, Brown CS alums Steven Shi and Alyssa Cantu were awarded the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Graduate (CSGrad4US) Fellowship. This honor aims to increase the number of diverse, domestic graduate students pursuing careers in the fields of computer science, computer engineering, or information science. More specifically, CSGrad4US offers an opportunity for bachelor’s degree holders who are working in industry to return to academia and pursue research-based doctoral degrees.