Brown CS News

Brown University Programming Languages Team (Brown PLT) has had three papers accepted at OOPSLA 2024, one of the most prominent international conferences on programming languages and software engineering. Two of them will receive Distinguished Paper Awards.

When used responsibly, AI can serve the public good: robotic assistants for people with disabilities; tools to help people express their creative visions; systems that help people improve their wellbeing; and more. Brown CS is partnering with Google Research to offer exploreCSR: Socially-Responsible Artificial Intelligence, a semester-long immersive research experience program for undergraduate students.

Brown CS faculty member Philip Klein was selected as an Amazon Scholar in the Spring semester of this year. The Amazon Scholar Program invites academics to collaborate with Amazon’s teams on technical challenges, offering them the chance to apply their research in a real-world context while maintaining ties to their academic institutions. Klein joins a group of scholars helping to solve complex problems using Amazon’s vast information and physical infrastructure.

Brown University’s Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) is pleased to announce a new endowed lecture series in honor of An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science Franco Preparata, an esteemed member of the Brown CS faculty who retired a decade ago. To be held annually, this year at 4 PM on October 10 in CIT 368, the Franco Preparata Distinguished Lecture Series will bring prominent scientists to Brown to address timely research in theoretical computer science, an area of particular interest to Franco. This year’s lecture (“From Consensus To Agreement”) will be delivered by Silvio Micali, Ford Foundation Professor …

Earlier this month, Brown CS doctoral student Alexander J. Gaidis, advised by faculty member Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis, has been named a Distinguished Artifact Reviewer for the 33rd Advanced Computing Systems Association (USENIX) Security Symposium. Held in Philadelphia this year, USENIX Security ​​brings together researchers, practitioners, system programmers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security and privacy of computer systems and networks. 

The Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), held since 1969, is widely considered one of the two most important conferences in the field of theory of computing. This year, a 1994 paper by Brown CS faculty member Eli Upfal received the conference’s 30-year Test of Time Award. His co-authors include Yossi Azar (Professor of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University), Andrei Z. Broder (Distinguished Scientist at Google), and Anna R. Karlin (Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle).

Brown CS Master’s student Yumeng Ma (advised by Brown CS faculty member Jeff Huang) has just received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her work in human-computer interaction, specifically at the intersection of human-AI interaction and accessibility. The award is the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, and aims to recognize and support outstanding graduate students in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Annually, the Mozilla free software community recognizes 25 people who are leading the next wave of the internet with the Rise25 Awards, which were awarded in Dublin, Ireland, on August 13. Aaron Gokaslan, who received both his undergraduate and Master’s degrees in computer science with Brown CS and is currently a PhD student at Cornell University, was nominated and chosen as a Rise25 honoree for the 2024 cohort.

This summer, Randall Balestriero has joined Brown CS as assistant professor. Visitors to his personal web page may find it somewhat atypical for a young academic. The first words that greet the viewer’s eye are a research area: Practical Deep Learning Theory. Randall’s name appears lower, in a sidebar. The reasoning, he says, is less about humility than the importance of good science and his excitement for a rapidly-evolving field.

The word "hacking" recurs in conversation with Deepti Raghavan, who just finished her doctorate at Stanford University. Not "hacker", a statement of identity, but a course of action, a challenging and rewarding process of analysis and refinement. This fall, Deepti joins Brown CS as assistant professor. She’s one of the four latest hires in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, our largest expansion to date.