The Computing Research Association (CRA) is a coalition of more than 200 organizations with the mission of enhancing innovation by joining with industry, government, and academia to strengthen research and advance education in computing. Every year, they recognize North American students who show phenomenal research potential with their Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, and for 2025-2026, four Brown CS students received honors: Joshua Yang (Runner-Up) as well as Arnie He, Wanjia Fu, and Alexander Portland (Honorable Mentions).
This year’s event was held from April 10-11 and Brown CS student Eashan Iyer, who expects to concentrate in Mathematical Physics and Computer Science, was part of a cross-university team that placed second in the competition.
The AAAS has elected Brown CS PhD alum Danfeng (Daphne) Yao (now Professor of CS, Elizabeth and James E. Turner Jr. '56 Faculty Fellow, and CACI Faculty Fellow at Virginia Tech) to the rank of Fellow.
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.
