Brown CS News

By leading in-school programs and after-school clubs that teach coding, the student organization Brown IgniteCS aims to expand access to careers in computer science for local K-12 students.

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.

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 …

Last week, Brown CS faculty member Kathi Fisler was an invited panelist at Stanford University's inaugural Embedded Ethics Conference, which offered broad discussions applicable to creating effective ethics education programs, covering the full life cycle of program creation, development, and implementation. Panelists from different universities addressed creating new ethics initiatives and how to structure a successful program once this is done, while instructors presented live teaching demonstrations and ethics curricula.

Speaking before a U.S. Senate committee on the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence, computer scientist Suresh Venkatasubramanian urged lawmakers to establish regulations to govern AI-based systems.

60 Minutes, America’s oldest and most-watched television newsmagazine, turned their attention this week to some of the problems surrounding ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence chatbot that’s been trained with massive amounts of internet text. For expert commentary, they chose Ellie Pavlick, Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University.

As hosts of new AI-powered chatbots and technology become widely available, and questions surface on their limits and power, Brown scholar Michael Littman offers insights into a debate that will only grow louder.

Late last month, the Rhode Island Israel Collaborative (RIIC), in partnership with Brown’s Division of Applied Mathematics and Brown CS, held the inaugural Israelis and Rhode Islanders Changing the World Through AI conference. Focused on the accelerating development of artificial intelligence, it brought together thought leaders from Israel and Rhode Island to discuss the latest innovations and trends in the field. Brown CS Professor Amy Greenwald gave one keynote; her Israeli counterpart was Professor Regina Barzilay of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The latest cover story from Conduit, the Brown CS annual magazine, is our deepest dive yet into the inner workings of our courses and how they advance our mission of serving an increasing diversity of students who have a broader set of career and life goals. It documents a new introductory course pathway, CSCI 0111-0112, as well as a new course, CSCI 0200, where all four introductory courses come together. 

In the pages below, we situate the new sequence by giving brief histories of earlier ones, examine the phenomenon of introductory course tribalism, explain the motivation for this latest …