Brown CS News

By using a phone camera and a new set of Instagram augmented reality filters, anyone can dive into the depths of space, encountering nebulae, pulsars and even remnants of exploded stars.

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.

Advancing a commitment to accessible robotics education, the Brown CS PhD student is researching how to simultaneously control multiple drones and teaching others how to build and operate them.

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.

The inaugural discussion in a series convened by Brown’s Office of the Provost and Data Science Institute detailed the history of artificial intelligence and new questions generative AI is raising.

Now in its fifth year, the Socially Responsible Computing (SRC) program at Brown CS, which helps aspiring technologists keep individual and societal interests at the forefront of their work, has received some significant new support: a grant from the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) that will promote curricular changes with wide-ranging implications for CS education. Directed by lead investigators Kathi Fisler and Julia Netter, both Brown CS faculty members, the grant will be managed jointly by Brown CS, Brown’s Data Science Institute, and Brown’s Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign (CNTR). PIT-UN is a partnership of 63 colleges …

The influence of computation and data analysis is not slowing down anytime soon. With BrownTogether support, the Department of Computer Science is building on its expertise to make sure society is ready for whatever comes next in technology.

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.