Now in its seventh year, the Brown Venture Prize, given by Brown University’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, awards a total of $50,000 to empower the most advanced entrepreneurial ventures by Brown students. It’s intended to help them accelerate and scale their innovations through funding, critical mentorship, and access to leaders in the Brown entrepreneurial community and beyond. This year, four of the eight honorees, including the first place and second place winners, were teams that included Brown CS students, faculty, or alums.
Held in Orlando, Florida, this week, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Virtual Reality conference (IEEE VR) is widely considered the premier international venue for the presentation of research results in the broad area of virtual reality (VR). The event’s Best Paper Awards are given to approximately the top 1% of total submissions, and new work, “Evaluating Text Reading Speed in VR Scenes and 3D Particle Visualizations”, from Brown CS alum Johannes Novotny and faculty member David Laidlaw, his doctoral advisor, is one of just six winners.
The Fulbright Program’s 2023-2024 year saw Brown University students and alums earn 36 Fulbright scholarships, the second-highest number in the nation. One of them, Bill Marino, is a recent recipient of Brown’s Master of Science in Cybersecurity, a fully online degree program that can be completed from anywhere in the world.
Every year, the Computing Research Assiciation (CRA) recognizes North American students who show phenomenal research potential with their Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, and for 2023-2024, four Brown CS students received honors: Megan Frisella (Finalist) and Anh Truong, Qiuhong Anna Wei, and Carolyn Zech (Honorable Mention).
Almost twenty-five years ago, the Association for Women in Mathematics established the Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize, to be awarded to an undergraduate woman for excellence in mathematics. This year, Brown CS student Mattie Ji, a senior majoring in Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Computer Science, was the prize's runner-up.
At the recent conference, work ("Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4") from Brown CS PhD student Yong Zheng-Xin, postdoctoral researcher Cristina Menghini of Brown’s Data Science Institute, and Brown CS faculty member Stephen Bach was selected from 121 submissions to receive the workshop's Best Paper Award.
Late last year, Brown CS faculty member Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis won the Top Reviewer Award for his work as a program committee member for the 2023 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CSS), the 30th anniversary of the conference, which was held in Copenhagen, Denmark. This award is given annually to the most influential reviewers for work and service provided at CCS, which is ACM’s flagship conference on computer security.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) is the organization’s flagship conference in computer systems and widely considered one of the world’s two top venues in systems research. Every year, their Student Research Competition allows undergraduate and graduate students to showcase their work to the community, and this year, Brown CS student Artem Agvanian and alum Hannah Gross (now a doctoral student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology) won prizes for their work.
Every year at the Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI), the Assocation for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) awards the AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator award, widely considered the highest honor in the field of AI education. This year's recipients were Brown CS faculty member Michael Littman and his longtime collaborator, Charles Isbell of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Last month, Brown CS alum John Stasko (now Regents Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech) received the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Visualization and Graphics Technical Community (IEEE VGTC).
