Brown CS News

Brown CS PhD student Tongyu Zhou was recently selected for the annual Rising Stars workshop, a program hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science that recognizes underrepresented PhD students and postdocs, especially those who could potentially become faculty members in the coming years. 

Brown CS faculty member Ernesto Zaldivar was recently selected to join the Army Cyber Institute (ACI) at West Point as a Cyber Law, Policy, and Strategy Non-Resident Fellow. The ACI bridges the public and private sectors to explore challenges through multiple disciplines, engaging military, government, academic, and industrial cyber communities through partnerships to enable effective Army operations throughout cyberspace. Some topics that the ACI researches include cyberspace operations, electromagnetic warfare, and cyber law and policy.

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.

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.

On May 11, Brown CS faculty member Ritambhara Singh gave a keynote address at the 1st International Caparica Conference on Prescriptomics and Precision Medicine, a biomedical conference on safety for precision medicine, which in its first iteration, focused on how researchers can develop models that leverage the properties of different biological or clinical data types that should be integrated to make accurate diagnostic predictions. Prescriptomics is an emerging field focusing on the complex interplay within genetics and their impact on the effectiveness, safety, and response to precision medicine.

The International Automated Negotiation Agents Competition (ANAC) is now in its 15th iteration of bringing together researchers from the negotiation community and spawning novel research in the field of autonomous agent design. Most recently, it was held at the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Auckland, New Zealand, in May of 2024, where Brown CS students Arnie He and Akash Singirikonda secured second place in the competition’s Supply Chain Management League with faculty member Amy Greenwald as their coach.

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.

 

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.