Brown CS News

A virtual event celebrated the legendary Brown University computer science professor for his foundational work in computer graphics and five decades of influential teaching.

Brown CS PhD student Fumeng Yang has just received a Computing Innovation fellowship, which will support her to join Northwestern University as a postdoctoral fellow in 2022. The Computing Innovation fellowship aids recent and soon-to-be PhD computing graduates whose job search was hampered by the continued disruption COVID-19 has had on academic job hiring practices and the economy. 

Professor Ritambhara Singh of Brown CS and Brown University’s Center for Computational Molecular Biology has just received the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)’s Genomic Innovator Award, a highly selective honor for early career scientists. Part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NHGRI is bestowing the honor on eleven researchers in the field of genomics this year. 

A report by a panel of experts chaired by a Brown professor concludes that AI has made a major leap from the lab to people’s lives in recent years, which increases the urgency to understand its potential negative effects.

The International Automated Negotiation Agents Competition (ANAC) is now in its eleventh year of bringing together researchers from the negotiation community and spawning novel research in the field of autonomous agent design. Most recently, it was held at the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in August of 2021, and Brown CS Professor Amy Greenwald, a team of Brown CS students, and a team of Turkish collaborators earned two awards in the competition's Supply Chain Management League (SCML).

Three months later, Suresh Venkatasubramanian’s May 17 tweet (“It’s time for a transition…”) is still getting shared. Announcing a new post at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as well as his decision to join Brown CS and Brown’s Data Science Initiative (DSI), as of this writing it’s just shy of 1,000 likes. Suresh, who starts this fall as professor, is the latest hire in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, the most significant expansion in the department’s history.

This week, Professor Michael Littman of Brown CS and his two collaborators on a 1998 paper have won a significant honor at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2021). His paper ("Planning and acting in partially observable stochastic domains"), coauthored with Leslie Pack Kaelbling (formerly of Brown CS, …

Last week, a two-person Brown CS team achieved a significant honor in the field of applied optimization. "Flamerunners" was composed of Master's student Shamay Samuel and alum Enrique Areyan Viqueira, and coached by Professor Serdar Kadioglu. After being chosen as a finalist from a pool of fourteen applicants, they won third place at the …

New research (“Using Relational Problems to Teach Property-Based Testing”) by Brown CS PhD student Jack Wrenn and Professors Tim Nelson and Shriram Krishnamurthi has recently won the annual Editors’ Choice Award for Volume 5 of The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming, popularly known as . “I think this paper,” …

Brown CS alum Scott A. Smolka was recently named a co-recipient of the 2021 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing for the pioneering paper “CCS Expressions, Finite State Processes, and Three Problems of Equivalence”. The Dijkstra Prize is awarded to distinguished papers that have significantly impacted either the theory …