Brown CS News

Category – Awards

Anna Lysyanskaya Receives A Peter G. Peterson Foundation Pandemic Response Policy Research Fund Award

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This year, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation Pandemic Response Policy Research Fund is providing $226,536 to support four Brown University research projects that will help policymakers, health officials, educators, and community leaders understand and address critical lessons learned from COVID-19. One of them (“Privacy-Preserving Digital Health Certificates”), led by Brown CS faculty member Anna Lysyanskaya, will explore using privacy-preserving authentication algorithms in digital vaccine credentials.

Chen Sun Receives A Salomon Award For Learning From Astronaut Spacewalk Videos

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A new project ("Learning Implicit Structured Neural Network Representation by Watching and Listening to Astronaut Spacewalk Videos") by Brown CS faculty member Chen Sun has just received a Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award. This honor, given annually by Brown University’s Office of the Vice President for Research, was established to support excellence in scholarly work by providing funding for selected faculty research projects of exceptional merit, with preference given to junior faculty in the process of building their research portfolio.

Brown CS Alum Ani Kristo And Collaborators Are 2022 Sort Benchmark Winners

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Developed in 1994 by Turing Award winner Jim Gray, Sort Benchmark is an annual competition in which researchers attempt to rapidly sort a terabyte of data. Brown CS alum Ani Kristo, now at Meta, and Adjunct Associate Professor Tim Kraska, now at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with collaborator Padmanabhan S. Pillai of Intel Labs, have recently won the contest’s top prize in the JouleSort Indy category, which measures energy efficiency, using a Learned Sorting algorithm. Their implementation, ELSAR, showed that one can sort a terabyte using 62,912 (+/- 372) joules with a runtime of 618.1 (+/- 5) seconds on …

Brown CS Undergraduates Advance To The International Collegiate Programming Contest Nationals

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Brown CS faculty member Yu Cheng, the department’s new ICPC coach, is himself a prior ICPC World Finalist. On February 25, he brought twelve students to the ICPC’s 2022 Northeast North America (NENA) Regional Contest at the College of the Holy Cross site: one team ranked sixth, earning one of four silver medals, and advanced to the North America Championship (NAC), to be held at the University of Central Florida in May. Their competitors will include teams from 50 universities from the United States and Canada that advanced to the NAC from one of the 11 North America Regional Contests, …

Vasileios Kemerlis Wins An NSF CAREER Award For Adaptive Hardening, Debloating, And Hardware-Assisted Protection

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The need for exploit mitigations is more critical than ever,” says Brown CS faculty member Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis, “and even more so when it comes to critical infrastructure. Despite years of research, software hardening still revolves around a ‘protect everything, the same way, all the time, at the same intensity’ approach that works well only with defenses that have negligible performance overhead and are oblivious to the settings in which the hardened software is used.”

 

Anh Truong And Qiuhong Anna Wei Win The Randy F. Pausch Computer Science Undergraduate Summer Research Award

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The Randy F. Pausch '82 Computer Science Undergraduate Summer Research Award, given this year to Anh Truong and Qiuhong Anna Wei to support their work with Brown CS faculty members Daniel Ritchie and Srinath Sridhar, respectively, recognizes strong achievement from undergraduate researchers and offers them the opportunity to continue their work over the summer.

Seny Kamara And Charalampos Papamanthou Win The 2022 CCS Test-Of-Time Award

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The Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) announced that Brown CS faculty member Seny Kamara and Brown CS alum and current Yale CS faculty member Charalampos Papamanthou won the CCS Test-Of-Time Award for a 2012 paper in the field of searchable encryption. At the time, Charalampos was a Brown CS PhD student advised by faculty member Roberto Tamassia, interning at Microsoft Research. Seny and co-author Tom Roeder were working at Microsoft Research.

Maurice Herlihy Becomes An Inaugural CNRS Fellow-Ambassadeur

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Located in Paris, France, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) is Europe’s largest fundamental scientific agency, a public institution that covers all scientific disciplines. Among the world’s leading research institutions, its scientists explore the living world, the universe, and the functioning of human societies in order to meet the major challenges of today and tomorrow. This year, the CNRS invited only a dozen outstanding researchers to be part of its inaugural Fellow-Ambassadeur program, and one of them was An Wang Professor of Computer Science Maurice Herlihy of Brown CS. He’ll spend at least three months in CNRS laboratories over …