CS Blog

Maurice Herlihy's  Distributed Computing Through Combinatorial Topology has just been selected by Computing Reviews as a Best of 2013 Notable Book. The entire list is available at the Computing Reviews site . Congratulations, Maurice!

Sorin Istrail  has received funding for the NSF grant “Genome-Wide Algorithms for Haplotype Reconstruction and Beyond: A Combined Haplotype Assembly and Identical-by-Descent Tracts Approach”. Human genomes are diploids, which means that each human has two haplotypes, one inherited from the mother and one inherited by the father; each haplotype is a set (chromosomes) of sequences of about 3.2 billions of A, C, G, and T. These haplotypes are mosaics of haplotype regions inherited from ancestors as a result of two major forces of evolution: recombination and mutation. When two or more individuals inherit the same haplotype region from a ...

Professors John Savage and Michael Littman share the news that BrownCS alumnus David Blei '97 has won an ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computer Sciences for his development of powerful modeling techniques to speed information retrieval from large data collections.

Michael says, "I'm really excited for David. I got to work with him a little bit when he was a super-promising undergrad here in the 90s and he's been setting the field on fire since then. Between him and Rob Schapire, Princeton's AI group is all Brown alums!"

The full press release is available here. The photograph ...

The robotics open house was hosted by the Brown Robotics Lab on first floor of the CIT Building.  Visitors were greeted in the lobby by Morgan Jenkins using a telepresence robot.  Through the telepresence robot, Morgan answered questions about the robotics lab and accompanied visitors to one of two rooms: 

Professor Anna Lysyanskaya was recently interviewed by WPRI's Dan Yorke about the situation in Ukraine.  Video of the interview can be found at WPRI's web site .

Professor Anna Lysyanskaya recently participated in a Watson Institute panel concerning the current situation in Ukraine.  Full details can be found in the Providence Journal article .

On Friday and Saturday, February 7 and 8, the Atlantic Council hosted their second annual Cyber 9/12 Student Competition in Washington DC. It is an event designed to give students a taste of the challenges that face White House policy makers when responding to national cybersecurity threats.

Twenty-two teams participated in the event representing twenty-four universities from as far away as Turkey and Estonia. A team of four Brown sophomores made an excellent showing. They not only advanced to the semifinal stage, they won the prize for Best Teamwork against much older teams. The “Brown Secure” team consisted of ...

Brown University Press Release Media Contact: Kevin Stacey

To keep data safe in the cloud, a group of computer scientists suggests doing the Melbourne Shuffle.

Yes, that’s a dance move , but it’s also a computer algorithm developed by researchers at Brown University.

The computing version of the Melbourne Shuffle aims to hide patterns that may emerge as users access data on cloud servers. Patterns of access could provide important information about a dataset — information that users don’t necessarily want others to know — even if the data files themselves are encrypted.

“Encrypting data is an important security measure ...

Imagine being tasked with designing protective clothing for law enforcement officers. The protective gear needs to be effective at stopping hurled projectiles while not severely restricting the movements of the wearer. To design such armor, it's useful to partition the human body into nearly rigid (lower arm and leg) and highly deformable parts (neck, elbow, and so on) capable of exhibiting independent motions. Tough, rigid plates along with flexible (and more expensive) materials can then be used to protect the rigid and deformable parts. Although it's relatively easy to manually define a coarse partition of the human body ...