Brown CS News

Ellie and her collaborators are conducting new research to enable us to understand and control so-called “black box” AI by creating tools that inspect, diagnose, and manipulate high-level algorithms. 

Brown University Programming Languages Team (Brown PLT) has had three papers accepted at OOPSLA 2024, one of the most prominent international conferences on programming languages and software engineering. Two of them will receive Distinguished Paper Awards.

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.

Earlier this month, Brown CS doctoral student Alexander J. Gaidis, advised by faculty member Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis, has been named a Distinguished Artifact Reviewer for the 33rd Advanced Computing Systems Association (USENIX) Security Symposium. Held in Philadelphia this year, USENIX Security ​​brings together researchers, practitioners, system programmers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security and privacy of computer systems and networks. 

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.

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.