Undergraduate student Colin Gordon was recently selected for Honorable Mention in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Award competition for 2008.

Colin's research was on a form of consistent, transactional updates in a modeling formalism called Abstract State Machines. The work resulted in a paper published at the ASM 2007 workshop. The paper was co-authored with two other Brown undergrads, Leo Meyerovich (who won a CRA Honorable Mention last year) and Joel Weinberger, and their professor, Shriram Krishnamurthi. Colin has also done research on dynamic contention management for software transactional memory with Maurice Herlihy.

Colin's service record ...

Master’s student E.J. Kalafarski is co-founder of Map the Candidates, an interactive map that uses the candidates' public schedules to keep track of their comings and goings. Map the Candidates tracks the presidential candidates as they campaign across the country via a Google Maps mashup which integrates YouTube video, timeline sliders, and local news feeds to bring the campaign events into an intuitive, customizable forum. E.J. and co-founder Chadwick Matlin believe the visual presentation and customizability of the data can help journalists and the average citizen get a feel for the trends of this campaign and what ...

The National Science Foundation has awarded funding in the expected amount of $700,000 for research at Brown in the use of cooperative "Smart Cameras" to sense and act in three dimensions. These camera networks will be capable of tasks such as reconstructing three-dimensional features, producing images from novel viewpoints, and tracking moving objects from camera to camera. These tasks are more challenging than the simpler data collection tasks performed by existing sensor networks that operate simpler, scalar data. The planned imaging applications require high data rates, remote sensing, and precise calibration. To address these challenges, the project ...

Brown University Assistant Professor of Computer Science Chad Jenkins was honored at the White House as one of the nation’s top young scientists. Jenkins was selected as one of the recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his research on the development of methods for autonomous robot control and perception. His work advances the idea that robot control and computational perception are better learned from human demonstration rather than by explicit computer programming.

The PECASE program recognizes outstanding scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the ...

On September 7, John Savage (with Andre' DeHon of UPenn) received a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation to study coded computation and storage at the nanoscale.

A key challenge before the semiconductor industry is coping with high error rates resulting from the decreasing size of chip features. Transient faults, along with permanent defects and stochastic assembly, make it difficult to implement traditional architectures. Research has been done on routing around defects and coping with large amounts of device variation. Little is known, however, about how to cope efficiently with high-rates of transient errors during computation. This research ...

Sorin Istrail, Julie Nguyen Brown Professor of Computational and Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Computer Science, has just received a NSF grant, “The cisGRN Browser and Database: cis-Regulatory Information Behind the Network.” Funding in the expected amount of $850,000 will be used by Istrail and his students — Ryan Tarpine and a few others to be added to the team — to develop algorithms and software tools for building genomic maps of the regulatory circuitry of cells. The work will focus on solutions to three major problems in the developmental biology community: building genomics libraries of software tools to reveal the ...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) along with the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), announced the winners of their fifth annual International Science and Technology Visualization Challenge.

Illustrators, photographers, computer programmers, and graphics specialists from around the world were invited to submit visualizations that would intrigue, explain and educate. More than 200 entries were received from 23 countries, representing every continent except the Arctic and Antarctica.

"Breakthroughs in science and engineering are often portrayed in movies and literature as 'ah-ha!' moments. What these artists and communicators have given us are similar experiences ...

Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck's Book Online Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization ranked highly in Best Sellers in Technology, October 2006–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services

http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6446307.html#BSL

In its 132nd year of publication, the Library Journal is the oldest and most respected publication covering the library field. Considered to be the “bible” of the library world, the Library Journal is read by over 100,000 library directors, administrators, and staff in public, academic, and special libraries. Library Journal is the single-most comprehensive publication for librarians, with groundbreaking features and analytical news reports covering ...

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who gave his last lecture at the university this past Tuesday, was featured on ABC-TV's "Good Morning America," Friday, Sept. 21, 2007. Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave a moving lecture before a packed McConomy Auditorium last Tuesday. In his talk, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own personal goals.

His talk is available on the Web at the University Lecture Series Journey's page.

http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/September ...

The Brown University computer science department today announced that Assistant Professor Anna Lysyanskaya has been included in the 2007 Technology Review TR35, an honor given each year to 35 innovators in science and technology under the age of 35 whose inventions and research the magazine finds most exciting. Anna’s extraordinary work in cryptography, identity verification and privacy protection led to her inclusion in this elite group of accomplished young innovators.

As evidenced daily in the media, reports of compromised corporate databases and online invasions of privacy are a frequent occurrence. To battle this problem, Anna has developed ground-breaking methods ...