Brown CS News

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 …

Brown CS is hiring multiple tenure-track faculty members at the level of Assistant Professor and a faculty position at the rank of lecturer, senior lecturer, or distinguished senior lecturer. We also have two postdoctoral opportunities available.

Brown CS Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian has just ended a 15-month appointment as advisor to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and The Brown Daily Herald's Jakobi Haskellhas just interviewed him about his work on the country's first blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which was released by the White House earlier this month.

At Brown CS and around the globe, interest in AI and related topics is soaring. CSCI 1470 Deep Learning, only a few years old, today has an enrollment of over 200 students. But as computer scientists hope to expand the field to historically underrepresented groups (HUGs), students from demographics that have born the brunt of algorithmic bias and deepfakes may be understandably hesitant to take part. exploreCSR: Socially-Responsible AI for Computational Creativity, a partnership between Brown CS and Google Research, aims to change that.

The Department of Computer Science at Brown University is hiring multiple tenure-track faculty members at the level of Assistant Professor and a faculty position at the rank of lecturer, senior lecturer, or distinguished senior lecturer.

Suresh Venkatasubramanian served as a White House advisor for the nation’s first “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” helping to develop a guide to ethical practices in an era of data-driven technologies.

Brown CS alums Shira Abramovich, Jessica Dai, and Hal Triedman are three of thirteen students chosen for the inaugural 2022 design and technology program of the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE).

Brown CS Professor Seny Kamara's keynote for CRYPTO 2020, "Crypto for the People", which took a critical look at who benefits from cryptography as it currently stands and explores how it can be used to fight oppression and violence, has already received more than 11,000 views. Seny describes it as an atypical keynote that was shaped by his experience of being Black, an immigrant, an applied cryptographer, and in particular, an outsider: one of perhaps only two or three Black cryptographers in the world. Last month, he followed it up with an invited talk ("Crypto for the People (Part 2)") …