Brown CS News

Brown CS alum and Advisory Board member danah boyd has just received a Sloan Research Fellowship, recognizing her as one of the most promising scientific researchers working today, part of the next generation of U.S. and Canadian scientific leaders.

Less than a year after a receiving one of the highest honors in the field of virtual reality, Brown CS alum and former adjunct research faculty member and visiting scholar Joseph J. Laviola Jr. (now Charles N. Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida) has been recognized again.

The event featured participation from more than 400 university students from across the country and 1,000 students from 76 different countries participating virtually. Brown CS concentrators on three separate teams came home with awards.
 

Brown CS Visual Computing PhD students Yiqing Liang and Rao Fu were recently selected for the annual Rising Stars workshop, a competitive program hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science that recognizes talented underrepresented PhD students and postdocs, especially those who could potentially become faculty members in the coming years.

Vasilis received a Top Reviewer Award and the group’s paper (“PickleBall: Secure Deserialization of Pickle-based Machine Learning Models”) received one of five Distinguished Artifact Awards. 

The Randy F. Pausch '82 Computer Science Undergraduate Summer Research Award, given this year to Wanjia Fu to support her work with Brown CS faculty member Srinath Sridhar, recognizes strong achievement from undergraduate researchers and offers them the opportunity to continue their work over the summer.

The USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) presented its Best Paper Award this year to a Brown CS team led by doctoral student Evangelos Lamprou and collaborators Lukas Lazarek, a postdoctoral researcher, and faculty member Nikos Vasilakis. Other collaborators include Ethan Williams and Zhuoxuan Zhang of Brown CS, Georgios Kaoukis of the National Technical University of Athens, Michael Greenberg of the Stevens Institute of Technology, and Konstantinos Kallas of UCLA. 

Brown CS PhD student Tassallah Amina Abdullahi has received the Best Social Impact Paper award at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), one of the premier international conferences in natural language processing. Her paper, "AfriMed-QA: A Pan-African, Multi-Specialty, Medical Question-Answering Benchmark Dataset", was co-written with several colleagues from institutions such as Georgia Tech, Ohio State University, Masakhane, Kenyatta University, McGill University, and Google Research.

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and American multinational technology company IBM jointly present the SIAM/IBM Early Career Research Award to recognize an individual in the field of data science who has made outstanding, influential, and lasting contributions within ten years of receiving a PhD. This year’s recipient is Brown CS visiting scientist and PhD alum Matteo Riondato (now at Amherst College), who was advised by Rush C. Hawkins Professor of Computer Science Eli Upfal. Matteo received the award at the 2025 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) in May in Alexandria, Virginia.

New research (“Towards Improving Reward Design in RL: A Reward Alignment Metric for RL Practitioners”) co-authored by Brown CS faculty member Serena Booth has received the conference’s Outstanding Paper Award for Emerging Topics in Reinforcement Learning.