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.
Stephen Bach (Assistant Professor of Computer Science) and Jonathan Pober (Assistant Professor of Physics), along with colleagues at the University of Washington, have been awarded a Collaborative Research grant from the National Science Foundation, called RFI Detection Across Six Orders of Magnitude in Intensity: A Unifying Framework with Weakly Supervised Machine Learning.
“Solving problems is thrilling for me,” says Yu Cheng, “and the exciting thing about being a theoretical computer scientist is knowing that algorithms and theory will always have a part to play in the field.” This fall, he joins Brown CS as assistant professor. He’s the latest hire in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, our largest expansion to date.
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.
