Brown University has joined forces with more than a dozen research universities and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to promote robotics and computer science education for African-American students.

The Advancing Robotics Technology for Societal Impact (ARTSI) Alliance will develop outreach programs to encourage African-American students at both the K-12 and college levels to pursue careers in computer science and robotics and will provide mentoring programs for undergraduates. The Alliance also will provide development activities for HBCU faculty who teach computer science and robotics courses. ARTSI is funded by a three-year, $2-million National Science Foundation grant.

At Brown, the program ...

Michael Black and his research group received a grant from the Rhode Island Science and Technology Advisory Council (STAC) for their collaboration with the Rhode Island State Police on forensic computer vision. The project explores new methods for tracking people in video and using three-dimensional modeling to estimate important biometric information such as height, weight and arm length.

The team will develop and test video analysis tools that will enable the police to recover 3-D human motion from low-resolution surveillance video, employ new methods for reconstructing an image of a suspect's face from low-quality video footage and provide biometric ...

Together with her coauthors J. Csirik, D. S. Johnson, J.B. Orlin, P.W. Shor, and R.R. Weber, Claire Mathieu received the 2007 ICS Prize given by the INFORMS Computing Society to papers at the interface between Operations Research and Computer Science. The prize was given for their paper " On the Sum-of-Squares Algorithm for Bin Packing."

In 2002, Pascal Van Hentenryck received the award for his many contributions to the field of Constraint Programming and its integration into Operations Research.

The ICS Prize is an annual award that promotes the development of high-quality work advancing the state ...