Brown CS faculty member Philip Klein was selected as an Amazon Scholar in the Spring semester of this year. The Amazon Scholar Program invites academics to collaborate with Amazon’s teams on technical challenges, offering them the chance to apply their research in a real-world context while maintaining ties to their academic institutions. Klein joins a group of scholars helping to solve complex problems using Amazon’s vast information and physical infrastructure.
Earlier this month, Brown CS doctoral student Alexander J. Gaidis, advised by faculty member Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis, has been named a Distinguished Artifact Reviewer for the 33rd Advanced Computing Systems Association (USENIX) Security Symposium. Held in Philadelphia this year, USENIX Security brings together researchers, practitioners, system programmers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security and privacy of computer systems and networks.
The Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), held since 1969, is widely considered one of the two most important conferences in the field of theory of computing. This year, a 1994 paper by Brown CS faculty member Eli Upfal received the conference’s 30-year Test of Time Award. His co-authors include Yossi Azar (Professor of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University), Andrei Z. Broder (Distinguished Scientist at Google), and Anna R. Karlin (Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle).
Brown CS Master’s student Yumeng Ma (advised by Brown CS faculty member Jeff Huang) has just received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her work in human-computer interaction, specifically at the intersection of human-AI interaction and accessibility. The award is the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, and aims to recognize and support outstanding graduate students in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Annually, the Mozilla free software community recognizes 25 people who are leading the next wave of the internet with the Rise25 Awards, which were awarded in Dublin, Ireland, on August 13. Aaron Gokaslan, who received both his undergraduate and Master’s degrees in computer science with Brown CS and is currently a PhD student at Cornell University, was nominated and chosen as a Rise25 honoree for the 2024 cohort.
The International Automated Negotiation Agents Competition (ANAC) is now in its 15th iteration of bringing together researchers from the negotiation community and spawning novel research in the field of autonomous agent design. Most recently, it was held at the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Auckland, New Zealand, in May of 2024, where Brown CS students Arnie He and Akash Singirikonda secured second place in the competition’s Supply Chain Management League with faculty member Amy Greenwald as their coach.
It’s never too late to make a change — just ask Michael Abela. The Brown alum graduated in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. In the final semester of his senior year, just months before Commencement, Abela enrolled in a climate solutions course taught by Associate Provost for Sustainability Stephen Porder. To say it was influential is an understatement.
Brown University’s Dean of the Faculty gives out five different awards annually to recognize continued excellence in teaching, and this year, Brown CS faculty member Shriram Krishnamurthi has received the Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Physical Sciences.
“It’s humbling to receive the same award as all our prior honorees,” says Shriram, “and....what makes me happiest is to see that our junior faculty are following the same tradition that Andy, John, and Peter established in the 60s and that has been a cultural touchstone for us ever since.”
Serdar Kadioglu, Brown CS adjunct faculty member and Group VP of AI at Fidelity Investments, recently won the 2024 AAAI Educational AI Video Competition, a new competition for informative AI videos for general audiences whose goal is to create positive videos that help spread informative, accurate, and timely information about AI research and applications for the general public. His video, “From Classical AI to Modern and Generative AI: The Evolution of AI Paradigms”, explored the decades-long progress of AI.
Now in its eighth year, Brown University’s annual Early Career Research Achievement Award is presented by the Office of the Vice President for Research and supported by the Office of the President and the Provost to nurture and recognize the extraordinary research contributions of faculty. This year, Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science Ellie Pavlick is the winner in the Physical Sciences category.
