Brown CS News

Timothy Edgar, a Visiting Fellow at the Watson Institute whose International Relations seminar on cyber conflict has been attracting many computer science concentrators, has been much in the news lately as he provides regular commentary on the continuing revelations about NSA surveillance.Edgar has been quoted in stories in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, and was interviewed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

Timothy Edgar

Edgar served in the Obama and Bush Administrations as a top privacy lawyer, doing stints in the office of the director of national intelligence, and as the first ever privacy ...

Computer Science PhD graduate student Jeff Rasley has received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a prestigious and highly competitive program.

Jeff is broadly interested in networks, distributed systems, and security. His current research is on network profiling of "big data" workloads, which aims to better understand the interaction and performance of data center networks and “big data” computing frameworks such as Hadoop. He is advised by Rodrigo Fonseca.

Jeff joins our other PhD students who have been recently supported by NSF Graduate Fellowships: Connor Gramazio, Michael Hughes, Dae Il Kim, Mark Leiserson, and Layla Oesper.

Michael Littman

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) has selected the 1994 paper Acting Optimally in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains by Anthony R. Cassandra, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, and Michael Littman, then a Brown CS graduate student, for a 2013 AAAI Classic Paper Award. This award was established in 1999 to honor author(s) of paper(s) deemed most influential from a specific conference year. This year's award recognizes papers from the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence that took place in 1994 in Seattle, Washington.

“Back in 1994, we were fascinated by the idea that an ...

The Department is delighted to announce that James Hays will be appointed Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science effective July 1, 2013. The University’s endowed assistant professorships recognize the achievements of promising junior faculty members.

“I am honored to be named a Manning assistant professor. This endowed position will help support new research directions for me and my students,” said Hays.

Hays’ research interests span computer graphics, computer vision, and computational photography. His research focuses on using "Internet-scale" data and crowd-sourcing to improve scene understanding and allow smarter image synthesis. Examples of recent research projects include: recognizing human sketched ...

Associate Professor Chad Jenkins has been named a 2013 National Geographic Emerging Explorer. National Geographic's Emerging Explorers Program recognizes and supports the uniquely gifted and inspiring who are at the beginning of a promising career in exploration and whose recent accomplishments show a potential for future breakthroughs.

“I am thrilled to join the 2013 class of National Geographic Emerging Explorers,” stated Jenkins. “Such recognition would not be possible without the supportive environment of Brown CS to truly explore new areas of research beyond common conventions.  My hope is that Human-Robot Interaction will have the same level of impact on ...

Yudi Fu and Douglas McErlean received honorable mentions from the 2013 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers Award program. The program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.

Yudi Fu works in Professor Andy van Dam’s Graphics Lab on the creation of three distinct generations of a touch-centric art viewing project: Garibaldi, Large Artwork Display on the Surface (LADS) and Touch Art Gallery (TAG), designed for museum curators to create and display digital artworks on (large) touch screens. Besides the user-centered design, Yudi is also responsible for the ...

The Second Human-Robot Interaction Symposium, to further define and develop the HRI Initiative at Brown, was held at ICERM on May 6, 2013. The symposium was organized by Computer Science faculty Chad Jenkins and Michael Littman along with CLPS professor Bertram Malle, and was sponsored by the Department of Computer Science, the Office of the Provost, and the Office of the Vice President for Research.

"Robotics is poised to be a game changing technology, which will change society over the next 40 years the way computing changed society in the last 40 years,” said Chad Jenkins. “Brown is in a ...

Jeff’s research seeks to understand user interactions to drive new applications at the intersection of human-computer interaction and information retrieval. Jeff expects to receive his Ph.D. in Information Science in June 2013 from the University of Washington at Seattle under the guidance of Professor Susan Dumais. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jeff is a 2012-2013 Facebook Fellowship recipient and was a Google Research Award ...

Anna Lysyanskaya

Anna Lysyanskaya was recently awarded a Google Faculty Research Award in the amount of $43,000 to fund research on the applications of cryptography in the cloud to obtain a single password.

The funding will be used study password-authenticated secret sharing that allows users to distribute data among several servers so that the data can be recovered using a single human-memorizable password. No single server (or even no group of servers up to a certain size) can mount an off-line dictionary attack on the password or learn anything about the data. This is because no server possesses the ...