Brown CS News

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).

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.

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. 

After working hard to make computer science part of his high school courseload, a young Nick DeMarinis was thrilled to end up in an advanced placement CS course in his senior year with a “really kind of eccentric” teacher at the helm. Nick is the most recent hire in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, the largest expansion in Brown CS history. Having successfully defended his doctoral thesis last September, he’s returning to the department this July as lecturer. 

At last month's Commencement ceremony, Brown CS presented diplomas to 366 undergraduate students, 21.8% of all the undergraduates who graduated from Brown this May. It's the highest number of graduations ever from a single department or school at Brown, and just as it’s been for the last six years, Computer Science is the most popular concentration on campus.

This week, Brown University hosts the Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM), bringing over 500 of the field’s thought leaders to Providence and demonstrating Brown’s continued status as one of the world’s leading centers for reinforcement learning (RL) research and study. Attendees will include the field's founders, Andy Barto and Rich Sutton, and many others who have made seminal contributions, including Peter Dayan, who in 2017 received a Brain Prize for identifying how RL principles explain the workings of the dopamine system in the brain and its implications for human decision-making and its disorders.

CS With Impact, the largest expansion in Brown CS history, has added five new faculty members this spring: 

Brown CS Professor George Konidaris has just received a Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award. This honor, given annually by Brown’s Office of the Vice-President for Research, was established to support excellence in scholarly work by providing funding for selected faculty research projects of exceptional merit with preference given to junior faculty who are in the process of building their research portfolio.

The Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Lecture, a tradition of more than two decades, honors a distinguished computer scientist who was an esteemed and beloved member of the Brown CS community. Paris came to Brown in 1981 and became a full professor in 1990. His research area was theoretical computer science, with emphasis on the principles of database systems, logic in computer science, the principles of distributed computing, and combinatorial optimization. He died in an airplane crash on December 20, 1995, along with his wife, Maria Teresa Otoya, and their two young children, Alexandra and Stephanos Kanellakis.

Brown University's Department of Computer Science has just announced that Zachary Espiritu, a Brown CS student, SPOC (Systems Programmer, Operator, and Consultant), and one of the four Meta-TAs who coordinate the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant program, 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.