Brown CS News

“I had a choice to take a high-paying job in Silicon Valley,” laughs Brown CS alum Victoria Chávez ‘18, “but I chose to follow my passions and make a difference.” Making a difference seems to be the hallmark of so many Brown students, and Victoria is no different. Currently working …

The Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) is an International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) conference that focuses on paradigms, approaches, and techniques used to conceptualize, define, and provide solutions to natural cryptographic problems and computer security concerns. With a single author paper from 2008 ("Incrementally Verifiable Computation or Proofs of …

Master's student Evangelia Anna (Lilika) Markatou of MIT and Professor Roberto Tamassia of Brown CS have just won the Best Paper Award for research ("Full Database Reconstruction with Access and Search Pattern Leakage") presented at the International Security Conference (ISC). They also co-wrote a second paper ("Mitigation Techniques for Attacks on 1-Dimensional …

Founded almost thirty years ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is one of the leading nonprofit organizations defending civil liberties in the digital world. In 1992, they established their Pioneer Award to recognize leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology. The …

"Here we are," said Brown CS Professor Andries "Andy" van Dam in 1987, "and we have to ask, perhaps rhetorically, has hypertext arrived?" He was delivering a keynote address at the first ACM Hypertext Conference (text available here) in which he credited visionaries Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson, reviewed Brown's hypertext experiments to date, and …

Computer science that benefits humanity, science that’s grounded in an awareness of its societal impact, has long been a Brown CS hallmark. Today, more than forty years after the founding of the department, global concern about the ethical and societal issues surrounding computing is greater than ever. This semester brings …

This year's ACM SIGMOD (Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data) conference was held in Amsterdam, and members of the Brown CS community returned from the event with two notable awards. PhD candidates Philipp Eichmann, Franco Solleza, and Junjay Tan; alum Nesime Tatbul; and Professor Stan Zdonik received the Best Demonstration Award and alums Nathaniel Weir and …