The Career Development Awards from Brown's ADVANCE program are intended to help faculty establish new collaborations with colleagues at other institutions and explore new research directions. Funded with a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation, the ADVANCE Program at Brown supports new initiatives for formal faculty development.

Amy plans to use the funds to build collaborative relationships with Electronic Commerce (sometimes called algorithmic economics or algorithmic game theory) research labs at Yahoo! and Microsoft. The hope is that these collaborations will lead to joint publications, and further funding opportunities through these companies' university relations programs.

Brown computer scientists have built a robot that can follow nonverbal commands from a person in a variety of environments -- indoors as well as outside -- all without having to adjust for variations in lighting.

Science Daily recently featured a piece on robotics research at Brown. The robotics group has demonstrated how a robot can follow nonverbal commands from a person in a variety of environments — indoors as well as outside — all without adjusting for lighting. According to the team’s leader, Chad Jenkins, “We have created a novel system where the robot will follow you at a precise distance, where ...

The Providence Business News recently featured a piece on Michael Black’s work on advanced forensic video analysis. Last year, Michael contacted Rhode Island State Police Lt. Dennis Pincince, who leads the Criminal Investigations Unit, about working together. The pair received a collaborative research grant from the R.I. Science and Technology Advisory Council which paid for department researcher Alex Weiss and another student to work full time on advanced video forensics at state police headquarters in Scituate last summer. Pincince said the collaboration was “particularly valuable because law enforcement officials have been using surveillance video more since the Sept ...