CS Blog

As a department, how do we evaluate our success? Continued innovation from our students means that we've aimed courses at the field's best opportunities, then taught them with real devotion to our craft. Together, that enables students to produce work that advances the state of the art.

In this series, we'll showcase some of the outstanding student work of 2014:

Flick
designed by Gabriel Fernandez
for CS 1300: Designing, Developing and Evaluating User Interfaces
taught by Jeff Huang
for Brown CS

Gabriel describes his project by saying:

"An application that runs on top of every other app ...

In an editorial outlining the need for "academic priority" to be placed on cybersecurity, the Brown Daily Herald recommends John Savage's CSCI 1800 ("Cybersecurity and International Relations") as "a paradigm in an expanded selection of courses offered by the University to address the complex and far-reaching nature of the issue more sufficiently".

The full story is available here.

Described as “a role model” by her new colleagues at Providence, Rhode Island’s Rochambeau Library, Gryte Satas, a PhD candidate at Brown University’s Department of Computer Science, has just made a unique contribution to her community. She’s leading a new Girls Who Code Club, designed to provide young women with computer science and programming skills, as well as opportunities to learn about everything from cryptography to artificial intelligence to developing mobile applications.

The club’s mission is inspiration and education, equipping girls with the skills to pursue 21st-century opportunities. Believed to be the only public club of ...

Brown University’s Danaë Metaxa-Kakavouli ‘15 has just been selected as the female runner-up for the Computing Research Association (CRA)’s Outstanding Researcher Award for PhD-granting institutions. Encouraged to compete for the honor by Brown University Computer Science (Brown CS) Professor Anna Lysyanskaya, she was nominated by Brown CS Assistant Professor Jeff Huang and Assistant Professor Michael Bernstein of Stanford University and supported by Brown CS Department Chair Ugur Cetintemel. Danaë’s work spans crowdsourcing, human-computer interaction, and data science, offering insight into issues of representation, bias, and the limits of knowledge.

“This year’s nominees,” writes the CRA’s ...

by Kevin Stacey (Science News Officer, Physical Sciences)

Using a computer algorithm that can sift through mounds of genetic data, researchers from Brown University have identified several networks of genes that, when hit by a mutation, could play a role in the development of multiple types of cancer.

The algorithm, called Hotnet2, was used to analyze genetic data from 12 different types of cancer assembled as part of the pan-cancer project of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The research looked at somatic mutations — those that occur in cells during one’s lifetime — and not genetic variants inherited from parents. The ...

by Michael McLaughlin

(reprinted with permission from Brown Alumni Magazine)

You can thank David Blei ’97 for all those personalized suggestions of things to buy that pop up on your screen whenever you’re online. In fact, the easiest way for this Columbia University computer science and statistics professor to explain his field of expertise—“probabilistic topic modeling”—is to talk about Amazon or Netflix or Etsy, the wildly popular website that sells handmade goods and crafts. (Etsy uses a variation of an algorithm that Blei cowrote.)

Amazon and Netflix use advanced formulas related to probabilistic topic modeling on you ...

For the second year in a row, Brown Computer Science brought an Hour of Code to Providence students at Nathan Bishop Middle School.  Hour of Code is a global initiative run by Code.org to bring programming to everyone, especially young students and those that are underrepresented in computing. President Obama kicked off the weeklong event by learning to write some Javascript.

This year Professor Amy Greenwald, graduate students David Abel, Amy Becker, Betsy Hilliard, Michael Majzoub (seen in the photo above), and Jeff Rasley, and undergraduate Luke Camery, visited all ten Gateway to Tech classes (more than 130 6th ...

Professor Valerie Barr of Union College has just followed up her inaugural lecture for the Brown CS Diversity Series (“The Toy Aisle Still Matters: The State Of Women In Computing”) with two blog posts based on her presentation.  They’re available here and here.  Professor Barr, thank you for laying a strong foundation for this important new series.

Brown University computer science concentrator Aaron Gokaslan ’18 and a team of his peers have just won a Best iOS App award from Apple at the recent HackPrinceton hackathon, earning an iPad Mini and the envy of several hundred of the country’s best young computer scientists. The event, which has been held semiannually for a number of years, challenged students of all levels to join together and create unique software applications.

“I was confident,” Aaron explains, “but the competition was intense. I truly enjoyed it, regardless of the outcome, but I only slept a few hours that weekend. I ...

Professor Andries van Dam of Brown University’s Department of Computer Science and his team of researchers were recently featured by the Brown Daily Herald for developing software that facilitates a high level of interaction with artwork and other images. The application, known as Touch Art Gallery (TAG), allows users to navigate easily around artwork and other images, zoom in to look at details, and even view archival materials, associated works, and contextual media.

The full story is available here.