CS Dept - Latest entries

Visiting Fellow Timothy Edgar comments on NSA surveillance, privacy rights, and the need for public debate

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 08:27:28 -0400

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.

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 director on the White House national security staff.“I worked with teams of lawyers and technologists on putting together privacy safeguards for some very sensitive programs, including those NSA programs that have been much in the news,” Edgar said.“One of the lessons I learned is the need for lawyers and policy officials to really listen to computer scientists.In today’s world, we cannot pretend it’s OK not to know how computers and the Internet works.”

Edgar says he believes the programs raise real privacy concerns, even with the detailed safeguards he helped put in place.“The public wasn’t given enough information to have a meaningful debate about these programs,” Edgar says.He believes that debate is overdue, and that Brown University has a range of expertise across multiple departments that can contribute to it.“Issues of cybersecurity and privacy are inherently interdisciplinary – drawing on computer science, international relations, public policy, sociology, math and many more disciplines in which Brown has enormous strengths,” he said.“It’s great to be here.”

Ph.D. Student Jeff Rasley Receives NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:12:36 -0400

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 Honored With 2013 AAAI Classic Paper Award

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:45:28 -0400

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 agent can make optimal decisions in spite of not knowing all the facts,” stated Michael Littman. “The math was originally developed in the operations research community, but we found that it was a perfect fit for the kinds of problems AI people are interested in addressing. These days, the notion of partial observability is a standard part of the AI vernacular.”

In academia a 'classic paper' is one that changes the direction of the field, typically because it identifies a “sweet spot”—a place where one can accomplish a lot without incurring overwhelming complexity. This paper is a classic "classic paper," added Professor Eugene Charniak.

James Hays Named Manning Assistant Professor

Tue, 28 May 2013 10:11:14 -0400

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 objects by learning from crowdsourced training data, restoring blurry photographs by modeling natural image statistics, and localizing photographs by predicting their overhead appearance and searching satellite imagery.

Professor John Hughes stated, “James Hays has been doing really exciting work in both computational photography and at the boundary between computer graphics and computer vision, on areas as diverse as determine the age of color images, writing a program that can recognize human sketches (think "Pictionary"), and learning to determine image attributes like "indoors" or "manmade" or "socializing”. At the same time, James has developed courses in these areas that have energized students and led to multiple publications for them in top-rate venues. He's really the model of a Brown professor, balancing teaching, research, and service, and he's the ideal choice for the Manning Assistant Professorship.”

Chad Jenkins Named National Geographic Emerging Explorer

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:26:38 -0400

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 the world that computing has had in recent decades, thanks in part to foundational work by several of my colleagues in Brown CS.”

Professor Jenkins earned recognition for his work in robot learning - training robots to learn from human demonstrations. His research group collects data from these demonstrations and creates algorithms that allow robots to draw from prior experience when faced with a new environment. Professor Jenkins envisions a future where robots will be widely accessible and will help society be productive in industry as well as daily life.

Yudi Fu and Douglas McErlean CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers Honorable Mentions

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:31:50 -0400

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 overall architecture of the system, including streaming data from the cloud, and she manages the training of other student researchers as a team leader.

Professor van Dam stated, “Yudi richly deserves this recognition – she’s been doing independent research since the end of her freshman year, culminating in her being the technical and managerial lead on one of my two research projects, the Touch Art Gallery, targeted to museums and libraries. She has distinguished herself in service as well, as a TA, as mentor to the students starting in my research group, and as an active liaison to our user community.”

Douglas McErlean worked with Professor Sorin Istrail on the problem of haplotype phasing in bioinformatics with extensions to more general forms of optimization. Doug first began this project when he took Professor Istrail’s medical bioinformatics class in Fall 2012. He continued to work on it afterward and turned it into an honors thesis on the topic of maximum likelihood optimization. Beyond haplotype phasing, Doug was also interested in security and worked with Professor and Chair Roberto Tamassia on implementing and testing oblivious storage algorithms. He also worked on a self directed project to create a web portal providing easy access to lightweight encrypted storage.

“Doug's independent research work culminating in his top department honor thesis, and his stellar performance in computer science and physics studies, are achievements that earned him this well-deserved recognition,” said Professor Istrail. “His thesis on maximum likelihood optimization, extending his final project in my graduate course Medical Bioinformatics defines an algebraic physics-inspired elasticity operator that explains what the quintessential, mysterious but practical EM algorithm is doing.”

CS Faculty organized Second Human-Robot Interaction Symposium

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:06:55 -0400

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 unique position to guide robotics to improve both productivity and quality of life for people across society."

The symposium’s goal was to introduce Brown faculty to one another’s work to help deepen as well as broaden the HRI Initiative. All participants were asked to write short paragraphs about how their current or future work might contribute to the HRI Initiative and introduce themselves to facilitate conversation. An intellectual marketplace was set up during lunch, a wall of white boards on which people brainstormed about how their research and ideas might form potential clusters under the initiative’s overarching themes.

"It was amazing to me to see the breadth of research projects happening across the University and the exciting ways that they can be related to the central HRI vision," stated Michael Littman.

Through interdisciplinary and collaborative effort, the HRI Initiative seeks to define: the societal needs robots can help fulfill; the technology and scientific knowledge to be gained in order to fulfill those needs; the human jobs needed to create and maintain the robots; the social, economic, and political impacts for humans interacting and working with robots; and training and preparation needed by students for this future.

The symposium featured 18 presentations from faculty in the areas of Design and Materials, Robotic-aided Science and Exploration, Computation for Robotics, Social Cognition and Interaction, and Health and Medicine.

"The symposium truly fulfilled its mission—to bring together a wide variety of scholars from all over campus whose work is relevant to HRI,” said Bertram Malle. “The more than 70 attendees covered 21 different units and departments at Brown. In addition to an expected strong showing from CS, CLPS, and Engineering, we had representatives from Biomedical Engineering, Planetary Geosciences, Public Health, Orthopedics, Economics, Archeology, Music, Sociology, and the Watson Institute, and many more. At Brown, great minds talk to one another."

Jeff Huang Joins the Department as Assistant Professor

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:18:20 -0400

The Department is delighted to announce that Jeff Huang will be joining its faculty as assistant professor beginning August 1, 2013.

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 winner in 2012. He was a CHI 2011 and CHI 2013 Best Paper Finalist and received the SIGIR 2010 Best Paper Award.

“I'm thrilled to be joining the Computer Science department at Brown and its community of amazing faculty, staff, and students,” said Jeff. “I am honored to have the opportunity to teach and do research at Brown, and cannot imagine a better place for my work. I look forward to collaborating with a diverse set of people to address the challenges of human-centered computing.”

Professor David Laidlaw stated, “I'm very psyched that Jeff will be joining us. He's a great addition to Brown's Computer Science Department. I think that his work on how humans and computers interact is going to become more and more important as computers become more and more embedded in our lives.”

“I am delighted to welcome Jeff to Brown, said Chair Roberto Tamassia. “His outstanding work is central to the department’s strategic research area of human-centric computing.”

Google Faculty Research Award Given to Anna Lysyanskaya for “One Password Is All You Need”

Thu, 02 May 2013 15:12:28 -0400

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 information needed for the dictionary attack: only when all the servers cooperate in an online attempt at retrieving the user’s data can they discover whether a submitted password guess was correct.

Lysyanskaya is excited that Google was interested in this work, because she is optimistic that this interest will lead to practical impact.

Barb Meier Receives Philip J. Bray Award for Teaching Excellence in the Physical Sciences

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:11:58 -0400

Barb Meier

Barb Meier has been selected to receive the Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Physical Sciences . The award will be presented to Barb at the Teaching Awards Ceremony on May 6, 4pm-6pm, in Pembroke 305. In addition to the recognition of her achievements, Barb will receive a professional development fund of $3,000 for each of two years.

The Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards recognize Brown faculty members for sustained and continued excellence in undergraduate teaching. Awards are made in each of the four major areas of the curriculum: humanities, life, physical and social sciences. The awards are named for past faculty members recognized for their teaching achievements: John Rowe Workman (Humanities), Elizabeth LeDuc (Life Sciences), Philip J. Bray (Physical Sciences), and William G. McLoughlin (Social Sciences).

“I couldn't be more thrilled to receive the Bray Award, but the real honor goes to my smart, dedicated, and industrious animation students who go to infinity and beyond again and again. Their humor, enthusiasm, and enduring friendships inspire me to explore new ways to share my passion. I'm grateful to the Computer Science Department for taking the risk to support my work at the ever-growing intersection of art and science, and to Brown for their recognition of my teaching practice with this award,” said Barb.

David Notkin ’77 1955-2013

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:19:54 -0400

A recent photo of Notkin

Notkin during his time at Brown

It is with heavy hearts that we announce that David Notkin ’77 passed away early this week following a long battle with cancer. He leaves behind his wife Cathy, his children Emma and Akiva, and his sister Debbie. David was a Professor and the Bradley Chair at the University of Washington and was a world leader in software engineering, and an extraordinary mentor, who served more than seven years on the CRA Board. In addition, he was an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow as well as the recipient of the 2013 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research award . David recently received CRA’s 2013 A. Nico Habermann award for his deep commitment for increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups in computing.

On February 1, 2013, more than 300 people joined in recognizing the contributions of David Notkin at “Notkinfest” held at the University of Washington. There, UW CSE announced the establishment of the David Notkin Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Computer Science & Engineering to enable UW Computer Science & Engineering to recruit the strongest graduate students in the nation and the world, and to honor the scholarship of David Notkin, his leadership in the field of computer science, and his contributions to UW CSE.

Andy van Dam writes, “David Notkin finally succumbed to cancer after valiantly fighting it for multiple years with grit, self-deprecating humor, and not a shred of self-pity. We were truly honored to have him as a Distinguished Lecturer just a few months ago, celebrating him as one of our best and brightest graduates. He exemplified what we all should aspire to as academics: to be dedicated and outstanding scholar/teachers and sought-after mentors whose impact on our fields and on our students outlasts us. Our hearts go out to his loving family and his many colleagues and students around the globe.”

Shriram Krishnamurthi added, “David was not just a leading light of software engineering research; he was also a kind and nurturing mentor. Indeed, in his case, the two traits went hand-in-hand. Both as a person and as a researcher, his focus was entirely on his fellow humans. David’s last major talk was here at Brown where he gave a hopeful and positive message for the future of software engineering.” The talk video is now available here .

His wife Cathy wrote, “If you want to donate anything in David's memory, I know David cares a great deal about Women in Technology ,our local FamilyWorks Resource Center and food bank , the UW scholarship for grad students in his name , and the non-profit he's been supporting me to run for several years. Or simply continue to donate your time and love to doing good in the world like you do already. He would like that. So would I.”

Maurice Herlihy Named Recipient of 2013 IEEE Computer Society Wallace McDowell Award

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:37:44 -0400

Maurice Herlihy, a computer science professor at Brown University, has been named the 2013 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s prestigious W. Wallace McDowell Award for his contributions to multiprocessor computation.

Herlihy, whose research focuses on practical and theoretical aspects of concurrent and distributed computing, was recognized for his “fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of multi-processor computation.” His early work on wait-free synchronization showed that different synchronization operations have different computational power, but that any operation that can solve consensus is universal.

The McDowell Award is given to individuals for outstanding recent theoretical, design, educational, practical, or other innovative contributions in the field of computing. The award may be given for a single contribution of great merit or a series of lesser contributions that have had or are expected to have an important influence on the computer field. It consists of a bronze medal and a $2,000 honorarium.

Working with Jeannette Wing, Herlihy invented the notion of linearizability, a popular correctness condition for concurrent data structures. He developed counting networks, a class of highly-concurrent, low-contention data structures for counting and related tasks, with James Aspnes and Nir Shavit. Also with Shavit, he developed new ways to reason about distributed algorithms, based on combinatorial and algebraic topology, yielding new lower bounds to previously unsolved problems. With Eliot Moss, Herlihy co-invented transactional memory, a multiprocessor synchronization architecture that has been incorporated into recent processors by Intel and IBM.

Herlihy has an AB in Mathematics from Harvard University, and a PhD in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University and on the staff of DEC Cambridge Research Lab and was the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, the 2004 Goedel Prize in Theoretical Computer Science, and the 2012 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing. He is an ACM Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

One of computing's most prestigious individual honors, the W. Wallace McDowell Award has a list of past winners that reads like a who's who of industry giants. They include FORTRAN creator John W. Backus (1967); supercomputer pioneers Seymour Cray (1968), Gene Amdahl (1976), and Ken Kennedy (1995); the architect of IBM's mainframe computer Frederick Brooks (1970); Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore (1978); Donald Knuth, the father of algorithm analysis (1980); microprocessor inventor Federico Faggin (1994); World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee (1996); Lotus Notes creator and Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie (2000); and IBM Fellow Ronald Fagin (2012).

McDowell, who spent decades working for IBM, directed development of the first commercial electronic calculator. He was later responsible for development of major advances, including IBM's card-programmed calculator, magnetic drums and tape units, magnetic core and disc storage, the company's "700" systems, and the Naval Ordinance Research Calculator. For more information, visit http://www.computer.org/portal/web/awards/wallace.

About IEEE Computer Society

IEEE Computer Society is the world's leading computing membership organization and the trusted information and career-development source for a global workforce of technology leaders including: professors, researchers, software engineers, IT professionals, employers, and students. The unmatched source for technology information, inspiration, and collaboration, the IEEE Computer Society is the source that computing professionals trust to provide high-quality, state-of-the-art information on an on-demand basis. The Computer Society provides a wide range of forums for top minds to come together, including technical conferences, publications, and a comprehensive digital library, unique training webinars,professional training, and the TechLeader Training Partner Program to help organizations increase their staff's technical knowledge and expertise. To find out more about the community for technology leaders, visit http://www.computer.org.

Herlihy honored as NAE member

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:58:30 -0500

Maurice Herlihy , professor of computer science, has been named a member of the National Academy of Engineering . Herlihy was honored for his work on concurrent computing techniques for linearizability, nonblocking data structures, and transactional memory . Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature,” and to the “pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

Stefanie Tellex Joins the Department as Assistant Professor

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 11:43:58 -0500

The Department is delighted to announce the addition of Stefanie Tellex to the faculty roster as an assistant professor, starting in the fall semester.

“We are very excited to welcome Stefanie to the department,” said Chair Roberto Tamassia. “She has outstanding creativity and unbounded energy. Her expertise in robotics and natural language understanding is highly synergistic with our strategic research priorities and we look forward to her leading new interdisciplinary projects.”

Eugene Charniak added, “I think it is great that Stefanie is coming to Brown. Her research area (human-robot communication) is exciting, and her approach (graphical models) is exactly right.”

"Stefanie has been a tremendous contributor to robotics and artificial intelligence in her young career,” said Chad Jenkins. “She has demonstrated a unique ability to find new approaches to solve hard technical problems while also improving the quality of human-robot interactions. We are thrilled to have such a rising star."

Stefanie received her PhD, M.S., M.Eng and S.B. from MIT and is currently working as a research scientist in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory . She was also a Postdoctoral research associate at MIT where she was the technical lead for the Interpretation of Spatial Language project, developing a language understanding system for robotic mobile manipulators. Stefanie’s current research interests include probabilistic graphical models, human-robot interaction, and grounded language understanding.

According to Stefanie, “I'm very excited to be joining the Brown Computer Science department. The CS department’s interdisciplinary environment provides new perspectives and tools to address the multi-faceted problems of human-robot interaction and language understanding. I look forward to engaging with students and faculty from diverse backgrounds to address these challenges.”

Stefanie joins our other three new faculty members , Michael Littman , Tim Kraska and Paul Valiant .

CS Faculty Co-Host Human-Robot Interaction Symposium

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 10:20:27 -0500

Members of the CS department, including Pedro Felzenszwalb , James Hays , Chad Jenkins , Michael Littman and Eli Upfal , participated in the Initiative in Human-Robot Interaction’s inaugural symposium on Monday, December 10. The symposium was organized by Chad, Michael, and Bertram Malle (CLPS) and was sponsored by the Department of Computer Science, the Digital Society Initiative, the Research Initiatives Office, and the Technology Ventures Office. The theme of the event was Fundamental Problems and Societal Solutions.

The symposium’s goal was to build a broad network of Brown scholars whose work speaks to issues of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and to draw attention to Brown’s existing capabilities and resources to advance innovative, high-impact research, teaching, and technology in this emerging field. It showcased current activities in five thematic areas: Perception, Decision, Interaction, Action, and Impact.

The field of HRI raises fundamental questions about cognition and action in humans and robots and their increasingly sophisticated interactions. HRI research is inherently multidisciplinary and calls for contributions from science, the arts, and industry. HRI is also nationally recognized for its transformative impact on society. Applications of HRI to healthcare and medicine, service industries, manufacturing, and scientific exploration have the potential to enhance human productivity and enrich our quality of life.

The symposium featured 20 informal ten-minute faculty presentations spanning diverse fields in the basic sciences, arts, humanities, and applied technology, setting the stage for rich HRI collaborations at Brown.

“I think the symposium was a big success,” said Michael Littman. “It showcased some of the diverse and fascinating work going on all around campus.”