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.
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.
It’s never too late to make a change — just ask Michael Abela. The Brown alum graduated in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. In the final semester of his senior year, just months before Commencement, Abela enrolled in a climate solutions course taught by Associate Provost for Sustainability Stephen Porder. To say it was influential is an understatement.
Held in Toronto, Canada, last month, the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (IEEE SATML) focuses on expanding on the theoretical and practical understandings of vulnerabilities inherent to ML systems, exploring the robustness of ML algorithms and systems, and aiding in developing a unified, coherent scientific community which aims to build trustworthy ML systems. The event’s organizers recognized only two papers with their Distinguished Paper Award, and new research by Brown CS PhD student Victor Ojewale was one of them.
Brown University’s Dean of the Faculty gives out five different awards annually to recognize continued excellence in teaching, and this year, Brown CS faculty member Shriram Krishnamurthi has received the Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Physical Sciences.
“It’s humbling to receive the same award as all our prior honorees,” says Shriram, “and....what makes me happiest is to see that our junior faculty are following the same tradition that Andy, John, and Peter established in the 60s and that has been a cultural touchstone for us ever since.”
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.
Now in its eighth year, Brown University’s annual Early Career Research Achievement Award is presented by the Office of the Vice President for Research and supported by the Office of the President and the Provost to nurture and recognize the extraordinary research contributions of faculty. This year, Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science Ellie Pavlick is the winner in the Physical Sciences category.
Brown University's Department of Computer Science has just announced that Qiuhong (Anna) Wei, a Brown CS student in the concurrent Master's program concentrating in Computer Science and Mathematics, a researcher in the Brown Visual Computing and Theoretical Computer Science at Brown groups, and one of the Meta Undergraduate Research Assistants (MURAs) who coordinate undergraduate research, has just won the Norman K. Meyrowitz '81 Award. Named for an alum known for his contributions to the department, the award recognizes exceptionally meritorious service to Brown CS and is accompanied by a cash prize of five hundred dollars.
Anika Bahl, Nathan Benavides-Luu, Nicholas Bottone, Swetabh Changkakoti, Ivery Chen, Jiahua Chen, Jack Cheng, Daniel Cho, Troy Conklin, Benjamin Goff, Mandy He, David Heffren, Dylan Hu, Helen Huang, Hammad Izhar, Mehek Jethani, Anirudh Narsipur, Anna Ohrt, Nishka Pant, Sreehari Rammohan, Joseph Rotella, Shreyas Sundara Raman, Shirley Loayza Sanchez, Anh Truong, Qiuhong (Anna) Wei, Angela Xing, Carolyn Zech, and Conrad Zimmerman have each received the Senior Prize in Computer Science for their academic work as well as their service to Brown CS.
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.
