CS Blog

At the twenty-second annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2014), PhD candidate Layla Oesper’s talk (“Quantifying Tumor Heterogeneity in Whole-Genome and Whole-Exome Sequencing Data”) received the Best Presentation Award, accompanied by a cash prize of $250, for the “HitSeq 2014: High-Throughput Sequencing Algorithms and Applications” workshop.

Reached for comment, Layla ...

Brown CS Professor Anna Lysyanskaya was again interviewed by WPRI's Dan Yorke and offered a commentary on the situation in Ukraine.  Video of the interview can be found at WPRI's web site .

“Our job is essentially to build things, to build knowledge, to create ideas, even crazy ideas,” says Brown CS Professor Chad Jenkins, “and put them out there so that others can build.” 

As a contribution to Brown University’s 250^th Anniversary celebrations, Professor Richard Fishman has interviewed a dozen faculty members as part of the Creative Mind Initiative (CMI), a program to develop innovative strategies for creative thinking.  CMI explores the creative process and integrates it across disciplines as well as between students and faculty.

Professor Andy van Dam and Jenkins were chosen from Brown CS to reflect on ...

Brown University’s Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) and Center for Computational Molecular Biology (CCMB) are looking forward to giving a record number of talks at one of the most prominent conferences in computational biology. Current and former students and post-docs of professor Ben Raphael presenting at the twenty-second annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2014) in Boston include Iman Hajirasouliha, Max Leiserson, Layla Oesper, Anna Ritz, and Hsin-Ta Wu, featuring work co-authored with Ahmad Mahmoody, Gryte Satas, and Suzanne Sindi.

Ben credits the strong Brown CS representation to a little bit of fortunate timing ...

Brown University Computer Science (BrownCS) alumnus Andy Pavlo PhD ’14 has just won the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Management Of Data (ACM SIGMOD)’s Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award for his recent thesis (“On the Optimization of Partitioned Database Management Systems”). He’s the first BrownCS recipient of the honor, which recognizes excellent research by doctoral candidates in the database field.

Andy summarizes his research by explaining that most databases in current use are predicated on designs from the 1970s where memory was more expensive and transaction speed reflected the slowness of manual data entry. “Today ...

Brown University Department of Computer Science (BrownCS) alumnus Alex Tarvo PhD ’14 has just won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)’s Student Research Competition Award for his research into predicting the performance of multi-threaded programs. He’s the second Brown CS recipient of the honor (Dan Keefe won in 2005 at ACM’s SIGGRAPH conference), which was awarded at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

“As we build computers with more and more cores,” Alex explains, “their behavior becomes increasingly complex and difficult to understand.” This challenge was the genesis of his award-winning work: Tarvo has designed models ...

Brown University Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) PhD student Genevieve Patterson has just helped organize the LDV Vision Summit, a start-up conference held in New York City to address trends and technologies in digital imaging and video technology. Founded by Evan Nisselson of LDV Capital, an investment group interested in technology-focused projects across the imaging/video spectrum, the summit brought together top technologists and investors with the purpose of shaping the future of imaging and video.

Genevieve’s previous work with professor Serge Belongie of Cornell Tech, one of Nisselson’s collaborators, made her a natural choice to help ...

Imagine a first-year computer science concentrator (let’s call him Luis) e-mailing friends and family back home after a few weeks with Brown Computer Science (BrownCS). Everything he expected to be challenging is even tougher than anticipated: generative recursion, writing specifications instead of implementations, learning how to test his code instead of just writing it. Worst of all is the workload. On any given night, he’s averaging –this seems too cruel to be possible– no more than eight or nine hours of sleep.

Wait, what?  Everyone knows that CS students don't get any sleep, so eight or nine ...

Timothy Edgar, a Visiting Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, has just written an article (“One Year After First Snowden Report, Search for Better Privacy Tech Continues”) published today in the Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal (subscription required).

Formerly the first director of privacy and civil liberties for the White House National Security staff, Tim uses the piece to addresses the current “universally poor” state of cybersecurity and the burst of innovation that has followed Edward Snowden’s revelations of one year ago. “The nation’s top cybersecurity official and its most wanted hacker,” he ...

“So awesome!” writes one enthusiastic YouTube commenter.

“Way too much fun for machine learning,” adds another.

For the past several years, Brown University Department of Computer Science professor Michael Littman has been extending a family tradition of writing spoof songs by making music videos to reinforce concepts taught in his classes.

“I was always a big fan of Weird Al Yankovic,” Michael says, “His gift for wordplay and ear for rhythm are unmatched.” While teaching a class on artificial intelligence back in 2001, Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” provided Littman with inspiration to summarize class topics ...