Brown CS News

Suresh Venkatasubramanian served as a White House advisor for the nation’s first “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” helping to develop a guide to ethical practices in an era of data-driven technologies.

Tassallah Amina Abdullahi, a second-year doctoral student in Computer Science, has won a highly competitive Computational and Data Science Fellowship from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (ACM SIGHPC). She is one of eleven fellowship winners for 2022 in the international competition, which is intended to increase the diversity of students pursuing graduate degrees in data science and computational science, including women and students from racial/ethnic backgrounds that have not traditionally participated in the computing field.       

After an unmatched eight years as Brown CS Department Chair, Khosrowshahi University Professor of Computer Science Ugur Çetintemel stepped down at the end of June, with Professor Roberto Tamassia now succeeding him. “It has been an extraordinary experience and an honor to serve as the head of this amazing department,” Ugur tells us. 

Last year, Brown CS alums Steven Shi and Alyssa Cantu were awarded the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Graduate (CSGrad4US) Fellowship. This honor aims to increase the number of diverse, domestic graduate students pursuing careers in the fields of computer science, computer engineering, or information science. More specifically, CSGrad4US offers an opportunity for bachelor’s degree holders who are working in industry to return to academia and pursue research-based doctoral degrees. 

Stephen Bach (Assistant Professor of Computer Science) and Jonathan Pober (Assistant Professor of Physics), along with colleagues at the University of Washington, have been awarded a Collaborative Research grant from the National Science Foundation, called RFI Detection Across Six Orders of Magnitude in Intensity: A Unifying Framework with Weakly Supervised Machine Learning.

“Solving problems is thrilling for me,” says Yu Cheng, “and the exciting thing about being a theoretical computer scientist is knowing that algorithms and theory will always have a part to play in the field.” This fall, he joins Brown CS as assistant professor. He’s the latest hire in the multi-year CS With Impact campaign, our largest expansion to date. 

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.