Brown CS News

Brown University’s Dean of the Faculty gives out five different awards annually to recognize continued excellence in teaching, and this year, Brown CS and Data Science Institute faculty member Ritambhara Singh has received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching for a junior faculty member from the physical or life sciences.

Okta Ventures, the venture investment arm of cloud-based identity solutions provider Okta, has recently announced the Identity 25, a list of trailblazers in the burgeoning field of digital identity, and Brown University’s James A. and Julie N. Brown Professor of Computer Science Anna Lysyanskaya is one of the honorees.

The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) is a nonprofit scientific organization whose purpose is to further research in cryptology and related fields. Every year at the Real World Crypto Symposium (RWC), they award the Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography, which honors major innovations in cryptography that have had a significant impact on the practice of cryptography and its use in real-world systems. Two prizes are awarded each year, and one of this year’s winners is Brown University James A. and Julie N. Brown Professor of Computer Science Anna Lysyanskaya. 

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

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.