Profs. Ugur Cetintemel and John Jannotti have been selected to receive one of Brown's highly competitive Salomon Awards. The $24,000 grant will support work on autonomous sensing and actuation applications. These applications will use sensors to observe the world around them and process the data they gather to reach conclusions and make decisions, and use actuators to affect the world on the basis of those decisions, all potentially without any human involvement.

Autonomous applications significantly extend the scope of today's sensor networks, which are used primarily to ease data collection for offline analysis by humans. The goal ...

top row l to r :

Shashank Ramaprasad, Matt Wronka, Dana Tenneson, Dan Acevedo Feliz, John Jannotti, Melih Bitim, Nesime Tatbul

bottow row l to r: Alex Zgolinski, Ivan Dotú, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Ugur Cetintemel, Yanif Ahmad

During the weekend of November 20/21, ByteSoccer successfully defended its middle-division intramural soccer championship.

Anchored by veterans Dan Acevedo, Yanif Ahmad, Melih Bitim and Ugur Cetintemel, ByteSoccer posted a 5-1 regular season record and claimed the #2 seed for the playoffs. Because of scheduling isisues, ByteSoccer had to play games on consecutive days. In addition, they had to do so without one of ...

Three Brown CS undergraduates have received Outstanding Undergraduate Awards the Computing Research Association's (CRA) annual competition. Pawel Wrotek '05 was selected as a Finalist in this competition, and Sarah Bell '05 and Michael Tschantz '05 received Honorable Mention.

In its email announcing these awards, the CRA says, "This year's nominees were a very impressive group. A number of them were commended for significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in successful use. It ...

Pat and Jim Mastors before meeting Gov. Carcieri

Ten students in Steve Reiss's freshman seminar CS009-3: "Building a Web Application" are creating a web application to support charitable contributions to a wide range of projects. The concept, conceived and directed by Pat and Jim Mastors, lets charities describe projects to be funded. Individual donors can then browse through the projects and choose those of interest. Feedback as used by E-bay or Amazon is given throughout to make the whole process self-regulating.

While the application is not yet complete, there has been interest in both the state government ...

Chad Jenkins

Odest Chadwicke (Chad) Jenkins

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

If the blockbuster movie I, Robot accurately portrays a future where human-like robots serve as collaborators and contribute toward the needs of human society, then Odest Chadwicke (Chad) Jenkins, assistant professor of computer science, will help make the future happen. Jenkins' research interests include humanoid robotics, machine learning and computer animation - all areas that could make a cinematic fantasy a possibility.

Jenkins' work aims to leverage abilities demonstrated by humans in the real world to control robots and virtual characters. His approach involves addressing two major questions: How can ...

CS224 (Spring ’04) student papers won first prize, second prize, and one of the two undergrad research awards at the ACM SIGGRAPH ’04 Student Research Competition held in LA in early August. Two more CS224 student papers made it to the semifinals (25 semifinalists out of 118 accepted submissions). Morgan McGuire (G), Andi Fein (’04) and Colin Hartnett (’04) won first prize and a total of $750 for their paper “Real-Time Cartoon Rendering of Smoke”. http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/graphics/games/CartoonSmoke/index.html Pawel Wrotek (’05), Alexander Rice (’05), and Morgan McGuire (G) won second prize and ...

Professor Amy Greenwald of this department has just received a prestigious PECASE (Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers) from the National Science Foundation. John H. Marburger III, Science Advisor to the President and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, presented the awards today at a White House ceremony in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to 20 National Science Foundation (NSF) supported researchers and 37 other scientists and engineers representing programs sponsored by eight other federal departments and agencies.

Amy was recognized for her research on how automated software agents can make decisions in uncertain environments ...

Maurice Herlihy has won the Gödel Prize for the year 2004 for his paper "The Topological Structure of Asynchronous Computability" (coauthored with Nur Shavit) (JACM 46, 6 (1999)). Other winners were Michael Saks and Fotios Zaharoglou, "Wait-Free k-Set Agreement Is Impossible: the Topology of Public Knowledge" (SIAM J. Computing 29, 5 (2000)).

The Gödel Prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science is sponsored jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computing Theory of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM-SIGACT ...

We're delighted to report that Prof. Anna Lysyanskaya has been awarded one of NSF's prestigious CAREER grants. These grants are designed, NSF says, to "recognize and support the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century". CAREER awardees are "selected on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization" and "build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education." Congratulations, Anna!

Anna summarizes ...

As many of you know, Tom Heft had been battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma for the past few years. He succumbed to this disease this past Saturday morning. He displayed amazing strength and good spirit throughout the ordeal. We will all miss him.

Here is the obituary printed in the New Bedford Standard-Times.

Thomas W. Heft, 41, of Degaris Avenue, South Dartmouth, Mass., died Saturday, March 20, 2004, at Home and Hospice Care of Rhode Island. Born in Winchester, Mass., a son of Eugene J. and Adele (Weestaway) Heft of North Ft. Myers, Fla., he grew up in Lexington, Mass., where he ...