The University of Nantes recently presented Pascal Van Hentenryck with the title of Doctor Honoris Causa at the 2011 ceremony of the doctors at the Cité des Congrès de Nantes. In the University’s 50th year, Pascal was the sole recipient of this prize and the first computer scientist to ever receive it. This is Pascal’s second doctor honoris causa, the first from the Université catholique de Louvain in 2008. The ceremony and Pacal’s talk are available (in French) on the University’s website and on YouTube.

Undergraduate student Nathan Malkin was recently selected for honorable mention in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Award competition for 2012.

Nathan began research with David Laidlaw his freshman year. As part of the Visualization Research Lab's collaboration with brain scientists, he worked to develop tools for selection, processing, and analysis of streamlines -- tracks, derived from MRI data, that visualize the diffusion of water molecules through the brain. More recently, he has pursued his interest in human decision-making by designing a platform for web-based multi-user decision experiments. He hopes to continue his research by using the tools he ...

The department is thrilled to announce that Nabeel N. Gillani ‘12 has been elected to the American Rhodes Scholar Class of 2012. Nabeel is the first Brown computer science student to receive this honor and was selected from a pool of 830 candidates.

Nabeel, majoring in applied mathematics and computer science, has also served as a research assistant on a biotechnology project with George Karniadakis, as a Microsoft program manager on Microsoft Access, as head TA for Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming, and is working now at Brown’s optimization lab on electricity restoration for disaster relief with Pascal van Hentenryck ...

Computer scientists Eli Upfal, Fabio Vandin, and Ben Raphael designed software to focus on groups of genes. Credit: Mike Cohea/Brown University

Computer scientists Eli Upfal, Fabio Vandin, and Ben Raphael designed software to focus on groups of genes. “Instead of identifying individual players,” Raphael asked, “can we identify the conspiracy?” Credit: Mike Cohea/Brown University by Richard Lewis

This summer, more than a hundred scientists from dozens of research institutions published a landmark paper that identified a single gene responsible for the most prevalent form of ovarian cancer. Their success hinged in no small part on an ingenious algorithm ...

The Department is pleased to announce the addition of Associate Professor Pedro Felzenszwalb as a new faculty member jointly appointed to the CS Department and the School of Engineering. He started at Brown in September after serving as a Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Pedro’s research is focused on computer vision, a field that uses algorithms and modeling to teach machines how to see. Computer vision has important applications, including robotics and artificial intelligence, medical image analysis and computer graphics, as well as aiding our understanding of human perception and intelligence.

“We are thrilled ...

The department’s Women in Computer Science (WiCS) group has been selected to receive a ReturnPath Student Seed Fund grant from the NCWIT. The WiCS work to increase the participation of women in computer science through social, mentoring, and outreach programs. The grant will be used to support these programs as well as new academic support, outreach, and scholarship programs that have been in the works for some time.

The Department of Computer Science is excited to announce the promotion of Ben Raphael to Associate Professor with tenure, effective July 1, 2011. “Ben’s promotion recognizes his extraordinary research work and excellent teaching,” said Department Chair Roberto Tamassia.

David Rand, Director of the CCMB added, "This is wonderful news. Ben's work is really at the forefront of several fields - computer science, evolutionary genomics and cancer biology - all of which are moving very rapidly. The CCMB and Brown are very fortunate to have him on the faculty, and I really look forward to working with him in the ...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a grant, in the expected amount of $736,987, to Stan Zdonik and Ugur Cetintemel to conduct research towards building a scientific database (SciDB), a system designed and optimized to support data-driven scientific applications. The aim of SciDB is to do for science what relational databases did for the business world, namely to provide a high performance, commercial-quality and scalable data management system appropriate for many science domains.

In contrast to existing database systems, SciDB is based on a multidimensional array data model and includes multiple features specific to and critical for science: provenance ...

Sharp Laboratories of America has recently provided a grant and a just released commercial product, a 60 inch touch LCD display, to Andy van Dam and his research team to foster a collaboration in research on touch-enabled user interfaces. Brown’s LADS application (Large Artwork Displayed on the Surface) designed to showcase such large format artworks as the enormous Garibaldi Panorama ran without any changes on this Windows 7 supported device. Work is underway to prototype a small-team collaboration scenario to take advantage of the Sharp interactive whiteboard. The scenario uses WorkTop, another application being developed in the group that ...

At the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies in Portland Oregon, Eugene Charniak was presented with the 2011 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award.

The award, presented annually since 2002, is given for scientific achievement, of both theoretical and applied nature, in the field of Computational Linguistics. Each year's winner is a well-kept secret until the closing plenary session of the Annual Conference, held this year on June 24. The recipient then gives the closing talk of the conference.

Eugene is the ninth recipient of this prestigious award.

Typically, award recipients give talks about what ...