Brown CS News

Brown CS is happy to announce that pending the approval of Brown’s Corporation and effective as of July 1, 2024, faculty members Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis and Ellie Pavlick have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure.

Held in Toronto, Canada, last month, the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (IEEE SATML) focuses on expanding on the theoretical and practical understandings of vulnerabilities inherent to ML systems, exploring the robustness of ML algorithms and systems, and aiding in developing a unified, coherent scientific community which aims to build trustworthy ML systems. The event’s organizers recognized only two papers with their Distinguished Paper Award, and new research by Brown CS PhD student Victor Ojewale was one of them. 

Brown CS PhD alum Sridhar Ramaswamy has recently been named Chief Executive Officer of Snowflake, an American cloud computing–based data cloud company with headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. Snowflake is a scalable data cloud platform that allows organizations to store, analyze, collaborate and build applications on top of data efficiently. Snowflake was ranked first on the Forbes Cloud 100 in 2019 and its initial public offering raised $3.4 billion in 2020, one of the largest software IPOs in history. Previously, Sridhar held the position of Snowflake’s Senior Vice President of AI.
 

Brown University’s Dean of the Faculty gives out five different awards annually to recognize continued excellence in teaching, and this year, Brown CS faculty member Shriram Krishnamurthi has received the Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Physical Sciences. 

“It’s humbling to receive the same award as all our prior honorees,” says Shriram, “and....what makes me happiest is to see that our junior faculty are following the same tradition that Andy, John, and Peter established in the 60s and that has been a cultural touchstone for us ever since.”

Each year, Brown CS invites one of the field's most prominent scientists to address wide-ranging topics in honor of Paris C. Kanellakis, a distinguished computer scientist who was an esteemed and beloved member of the Brown CS community. Last month, Avrim Blum, Professor and Chief Academic Officer of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), delivered the twenty-third annual Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Lecture: “Robustly-reliable learners for unreliable data”. 

Serdar Kadioglu, Brown CS adjunct faculty member and Group VP of AI at Fidelity Investments, recently won the 2024 AAAI Educational AI Video Competition, a new competition for informative AI videos for general audiences whose goal is to create positive videos that help spread informative, accurate, and timely information about AI research and applications for the general public. His video, “From Classical AI to Modern and Generative AI: The Evolution of AI Paradigms”, explored the decades-long progress of AI.

Now in its eighth year, Brown University’s annual Early Career Research Achievement Award is presented by the Office of the Vice President for Research and supported by the Office of the President and the Provost to nurture and recognize the extraordinary research contributions of faculty. This year, Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science Ellie Pavlick is the winner in the Physical Sciences category.

Brown University's Department of Computer Science has just announced that Qiuhong (Anna) Wei, a Brown CS student in the concurrent Master's program concentrating in Computer Science and Mathematics, a researcher in the Brown Visual Computing and Theoretical Computer Science at Brown groups, and one of the Meta Undergraduate Research Assistants (MURAs) who coordinate undergraduate research, has just won the Norman K. Meyrowitz '81 Award. Named for an alum known for his contributions to the department, the award recognizes exceptionally meritorious service to Brown CS and is accompanied by a cash prize of five hundred dollars.

 

Anika Bahl, Nathan Benavides-Luu, Nicholas Bottone, Swetabh Changkakoti, Ivery Chen, Jiahua Chen, Jack Cheng, Daniel Cho, Troy Conklin, Benjamin Goff, Mandy He, David Heffren, Dylan Hu, Helen Huang, Hammad Izhar, Mehek Jethani, Anirudh Narsipur, Anna Ohrt, Nishka Pant, Sreehari Rammohan, Joseph Rotella, Shreyas Sundara Raman, Shirley Loayza Sanchez, Anh Truong, Qiuhong (Anna) Wei, Angela Xing, Carolyn Zech, and Conrad Zimmerman have each received the Senior Prize in Computer Science for their academic work as well as their service to Brown CS.  
 

 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT’s) iQuHACK (Interdisciplinary Quantum Hackathon) is MIT’s annual quantum hackathon that aims to bring students from a diverse set of backgrounds and from high school through early-career professionals to explore improvements and applications of near-term quantum devices. The 2024 iteration of the hackathon was held in early February and offered both an in-person hackathon where participants developed and tested their code on real quantum hardware as well as a virtual hackathon for a larger outreach to further students.