Brown CS News

Category – Diversity

Brown CS PhD Student Tongyu Zhou Has Been Selected For MIT’s EECS Rising Stars Program

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Brown CS PhD student Tongyu Zhou was recently selected for the annual Rising Stars workshop, a program hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science that recognizes underrepresented PhD students and postdocs, especially those who could potentially become faculty members in the coming years. 

Apply Today: Researching Socially-Responsible AI With Students From HUGs

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When used responsibly, AI can serve the public good: robotic assistants for people with disabilities; tools to help people express their creative visions; systems that help people improve their wellbeing; and more. Brown CS is partnering with Google Research to offer exploreCSR: Socially-Responsible Artificial Intelligence, a semester-long immersive research experience program for undergraduate students.

Philip Klein Has Been Recognized As An Amazon Scholar

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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.

Brown CS Master’s Student Yumeng Ma Receives An NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

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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.

Ritambhara Singh Gives A Keynote At The International Caparica Conference On Prescriptomics And Precision Medicine

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On May 11, Brown CS faculty member Ritambhara Singh gave a keynote address at the 1st International Caparica Conference on Prescriptomics and Precision Medicine, a biomedical conference on safety for precision medicine, which in its first iteration, focused on how researchers can develop models that leverage the properties of different biological or clinical data types that should be integrated to make accurate diagnostic predictions. Prescriptomics is an emerging field focusing on the complex interplay within genetics and their impact on the effectiveness, safety, and response to precision medicine.

Brown Students Place In The Top Two In Multiple Challenges At MIT iQuHACK 2024

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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. 

Brown CS Student Sabrina Chwalek Worked To Reduce Nuclear And Biological Threats In Her Recent Internship

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A member of the current Brown CS graduating class, Sabrina Chwalek participated in the Brown in Washington program last semester, which welcomes talented Brown undergraduate students who want to apply theory to practice in their concentration area to the District of Columbia. She interned at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan global security organization focused on reducing nuclear and biological threats imperiling humanity.

Brown CS Student Mattie Ji Is A Runner-Up For The Schafer Prize For Excellence In Mathematics By An Undergraduate Woman

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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.

George Konidaris Cofounds Lelapa AI To Develop Homegrown African AI

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Last month, Brown CS faculty member George Konidaris joined with five other artificial intelligence thought leaders in his home country of South Africa to found a commercial AI lab that may be the first of its kind: Lelapa AI. Lelapa's goal is to reverse the brain drain by enticing African AI researchers to return to the continent, and to use their talents to produce socially-grounded, Africa-centric AI for the benefit of the global south, which contains more than 85% of the world's population. Lelapa is built on three primary intentions: wisdom (in particular, Africa's niche skills in resource efficiency), family …