Brown CS News

Vasileios Kemerlis Wins An NSF CAREER Award For Adaptive Hardening, Debloating, And Hardware-Assisted Protection

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The need for exploit mitigations is more critical than ever,” says Brown CS faculty member Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis, “and even more so when it comes to critical infrastructure. Despite years of research, software hardening still revolves around a ‘protect everything, the same way, all the time, at the same intensity’ approach that works well only with defenses that have negligible performance overhead and are oblivious to the settings in which the hardened software is used.”

 

Anh Truong And Qiuhong Anna Wei Win The Randy F. Pausch Computer Science Undergraduate Summer Research Award

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The Randy F. Pausch '82 Computer Science Undergraduate Summer Research Award, given this year to Anh Truong and Qiuhong Anna Wei to support their work with Brown CS faculty members Daniel Ritchie and Srinath Sridhar, respectively, recognizes strong achievement from undergraduate researchers and offers them the opportunity to continue their work over the summer.

Kathi Fisler Talks Socially Responsible Computing At The Inaugural Embedded Ethics Conference

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Last week, Brown CS faculty member Kathi Fisler was an invited panelist at Stanford University's inaugural Embedded Ethics Conference, which offered broad discussions applicable to creating effective ethics education programs, covering the full life cycle of program creation, development, and implementation. Panelists from different universities addressed creating new ethics initiatives and how to structure a successful program once this is done, while instructors presented live teaching demonstrations and ethics curricula.

Brown CS Alum Nick Leiserson Has Been Named The White House’s Assistant National Cyber Director For Cyber Policy And Programs

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Late last year, the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director announced that Brown CS alum Nick Leiserson is the new Assistant National Cyber Director for Cyber Policy and Programs, serving under National Cyber Director Chris Inglis. By statute, their office serves as the primary advisor to the Biden-Harris administration on cybersecurity policy and incident response and works with national departments and agencies to implement national cybersecurity strategy.

60 Minutes Asks Ellie Pavlick About ChatGPT And Large Language Model Bias

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60 Minutes, America’s oldest and most-watched television newsmagazine, turned their attention this week to some of the problems surrounding ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence chatbot that’s been trained with massive amounts of internet text. For expert commentary, they chose Ellie Pavlick, Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University.

Brown CS Will Work In Good Faith With TALO

The CS Department recognizes the decision of our undergraduate teaching assistants to form a union. We will work in good faith around the important matters of terms and conditions of employment for the members of the bargaining unit. We remain fully committed to our UTA program and to ensuring that it is a valuable academic experience for generations of students to come.

An Institute Is Born

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On Tuesday, February 7, the Brown faculty voted in favor of creating a Brown Data Science Institute, building on the Data Science Initiative that was created here in 2016. On Friday, DSI Director Sohini Ramachandran presented the proposal to the Corporation, who approved the faculty’s recommendation.

Seny Kamara And Charalampos Papamanthou Win The 2022 CCS Test-Of-Time Award

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The Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) announced that Brown CS faculty member Seny Kamara and Brown CS alum and current Yale CS faculty member Charalampos Papamanthou won the CCS Test-Of-Time Award for a 2012 paper in the field of searchable encryption. At the time, Charalampos was a Brown CS PhD student advised by faculty member Roberto Tamassia, interning at Microsoft Research. Seny and co-author Tom Roeder were working at Microsoft Research.