At Brown University’s 241st Commencement exercises on Sunday, May 24, 2009, the Computer Science Department awarded an all-time high of 42 Master of Science degrees. In addition, 56 bachelor’s degrees and seven Ph.D.s were conferred in the department’s 30th year. Chair Roberto Tamassia said, “Congratulations to the class of 2009! We enjoyed having all of you as part of the computer science ‘family’ here at Brown, and we look forward to watching your successes in the coming years.”

The graduates are:

A.B. Computer Science: Brian Chang, Landon Judkins, Nicholas Leiserson, Andrew Miller (Also completed ...

Micha Elsner, a Ph.D. student researching natural language processing with Eugene Charniak and Mark Johnson in the Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing (BLLIP), was recently awarded an inaugural Google Fellowship. This two-year fellowship includes financial support for tuition and fees as well as funding for conference attendance and travel, a personal computer and an Android-powered phone.

Micha’s research focuses on computer programs for understanding discourse --- the way the meanings of individual sentences in a document merge to form the meaning of the whole. His work has been presented at several conferences, most recently at the NAACL-HLT 2009 ...