Brown CS Professor Seny Kamara's keynote for CRYPTO 2020, "Crypto for the People", which took a critical look at who benefits from cryptography as it currently stands and explores how it can be used to fight oppression and violence, has already received more than 11,000 views. Seny describes it as an atypical keynote that was shaped by his experience of being Black, an immigrant, an applied cryptographer, and in particular, an outsider: one of perhaps only two or three Black cryptographers in the world. Last month, he followed it up with an invited talk ("Crypto for the People (Part 2)") …
Brown CS is mourning the loss of our alum and friend, Isabel Cruz, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC)’s College of Engineering. She passed away on September 19, 2021, following unexpected complications from surgery. Her life partner, Brown Plastech Professor of Computer Science Roberto Tamassia, offers her biography and their shared story on his website, and he expresses his gratitude to Isabel’s many colleagues, mentees, and friends who have sent us their own memories of her, some of which we include below.
Every year, the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the EATCS Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC) award the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing to distinguished papers that have significantly impacted distributed computing's theory or practice. In 2022, Professor Maurice Herlihy of Brown CS and his collaborators have won the award, the Head of the Dijkstra Prize Committee writes, "for providing the first general approach to memory reclamation in nonblocking data structures, with significant impact both in research and practice".
Brown University's Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship is awarded each year to regular untenured members of the faculty who have achieved a record of excellence in teaching and scholarship during their first years at Brown. This year's winner, chosen by a faculty committee, is Professor Malte Schwarzkopf of Brown CS. The honor includes a semester of leave on special assignment at full compensation.
New research ("Types for Tables: A Language Design Benchmark") by Brown CS PhD student Kuang-Chen Lu, Postdoctoral Research Associate Benjamin Greenman, and Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi has won the annual Editors’ Choice Award for Volume 6 of The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming, popularly known as <Programming>.
The Randy F. Pausch '82 Computer Science Undergraduate Summer Research Award, given this year to Rhea Goyal and Eliot Laidlaw to support their work with Brown CS Professors Malte Schwarzkopf and James Tompkin, respectively, recognizes strong achievement from undergraduate researchers and offers them the opportunity to continue their work over the summer.
New research co-authored by Shaun Wallace, a Brown CS PhD student and Technical Staff member, has recently won a UserTesting Illumi Award. UserTesting is one of the world's leading human insight platforms. They created the award to inspire the world to think about human insights as a key ingredient for customer experience excellence, product and marketing innovation, and team success.
"Everyday human activities," says Brown CS Professor Srinath Sridhar, "are impressive feats of physical intelligence – from careful placement of feet to avoid obstacles when walking to the precise and highly coordinated movement of fingers to type a sentence. Robots with even a fraction of human physical intelligence could revolutionize lives by automating repetitive tasks. Despite advances, however, robots with such physical abilities remain elusive."
But not forever, and Srinath has just received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award that will take a step toward these more capable robots. CAREER Awards are given in support of outstanding junior faculty …
"Research in this field," says Brown CS Professor Daniel Ritchie, "is poised to revolutionize the means of personal expression for everyone: in writing, photography, design, architecture, and more."
He's talking about creative applications of artificial intelligence (creative generative models, detecting "fake" generated designs, AI for game playing, and more), which will be the focus of a new, nine-week, fully-funded, Brown CS summer residential program. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, "Artificial Intelligence for Computational Creativity" is an NSF Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site aimed at students from historically underrepresented groups (HUGs) in computer science, bringing them to the …
Brown CS Professor Kathi Fisler has just joined the editorial board of Communications of the ACM (CACM), widely regarded as the leading print and online publication for the computing and information technology fields. With a history of more than a half-century, the CACM print magazine reaches more than 100,000 ACM members monthly, and its Communications website continues the tradition of in-depth coverage of emerging areas of computer science, new trends in information technology, and practical applications.
