The Computing Research Association (CRA) is a coalition of more than 200 organizations with the mission of enhancing innovation by joining with industry, government, and academia to strengthen research and advance education in computing. Every year, they recognize North American students who show phenomenal research potential with their Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, and for 2024-2025, four Brown CS students received honors: Artem Agvanian and Corinn Tiffany (Finalists) alongside Byron Butaney and Kaleb Newman (Honorable Mentions).
Over the weekend of October 5, three Brown CS undergraduates, Noah Kim, Sean Kim, and Eric Yoon, won first place in the Healthcare Track at Yale University’s annual hackathon, dubbed YHack, with their personal project fueled by artificial intelligence.
Brown CS PhD student Tongyu Zhou was recently selected for the annual Rising Stars workshop, a program hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science that recognizes underrepresented PhD students and postdocs, especially those who could potentially become faculty members in the coming years.
Brown CS faculty member Ernesto Zaldivar was recently selected to join the Army Cyber Institute (ACI) at West Point as a Cyber Law, Policy, and Strategy Non-Resident Fellow. The ACI bridges the public and private sectors to explore challenges through multiple disciplines, engaging military, government, academic, and industrial cyber communities through partnerships to enable effective Army operations throughout cyberspace. Some topics that the ACI researches include cyberspace operations, electromagnetic warfare, and cyber law and policy.
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.
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.
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.
At the recent conference, work ("Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4") from Brown CS PhD student Yong Zheng-Xin, postdoctoral researcher Cristina Menghini of Brown’s Data Science Institute, and Brown CS faculty member Stephen Bach was selected from 121 submissions to receive the workshop's Best Paper Award.
This year, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation Pandemic Response Policy Research Fund is providing $226,536 to support four Brown University research projects that will help policymakers, health officials, educators, and community leaders understand and address critical lessons learned from COVID-19. One of them (“Privacy-Preserving Digital Health Certificates”), led by Brown CS faculty member Anna Lysyanskaya, will explore using privacy-preserving authentication algorithms in digital vaccine credentials.
