CS Blog

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 ...

Reached by phone after his recent shared triumph, Professor Maurice Herlihy of Brown University’s Computer Science Department was feeling optimistic: “This is good news for programmers.” The paper that he co-wrote with PhD student Zhiyu Liu (“Well-Structured Futures and Cache Locality”) had just won the Best Paper Award at the Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP 2014). It’s the first time that CS faculty or students have received this honor.

Why should programmers celebrate? It helps first to understand futures. “We can think of them as a promise to ...

The core of computer vision is concentrated on learning how to automatically recognise things that humans are already awesome at recognising (dogs, cats, sail boats, handwriting, etc.). Humans can recognise these things in approximately 0.3 seconds -- you can recognize a Jack Russell before you can even think the words ‘super cute dog,' [1]. Humans are great computers.

A growing cohort of vision researchers are trying to make vision algorithms do things that the average human can’t do. These algorithms can identify insect and bird species, recognise fashionable clothing, even detect in which Parisian arrondissement a photograph was taken ...

Timothy Edgar

Dr. Edgar is a Visiting Faculty Fellow in the Watson Institute and is teaching CSCI1951B (Viral Citizens or Subjects? The Global Battle Over Governing Your Internet) this semester.

Data is the new soil of business and (soon) at the core of essentially all domains from material science to healthcare. The possibilities are sheer endless. In 2007 the Wired Magazine got even so far and predicted "The End of Science: The quest of knowledge used to begin with grand theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data." Just as a showcase: researchers within the Archaeology and Anthropology department at the University of Bristol used n-grams created by the Google Books project to analyze how emotions have been expressed over centuries . The results clearly show the effect of World ...