Brown CS Blog

A recent article in the Boston Globe confirms something that few Brown University students, faculty, and staff are unaware of: gorgeous coastline is just a few miles down the road. Family Vacation Critic, the family travel site for TripAdvisor, has chosen Misquamicut State Beach in Westerly as one of the top …

Professor John Savage of Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) closed 2015 with a number of important achievements in the area of cybersecurity, including being appointed to Rhode Island's first Cybersecurity Commission, re-appointed as an EastWest Institute Professorial Fellow, and serving as a panelist at the Wuzhen, China meeting of the IEEE Experts …

Self-described as a "different kind of hackathon" designed with goals of inclusiveness, experimentation, learning, and collaboration in mind, Hack@Brown turned three this year and showed strong success on all counts. Held on February 6-7, 2015, with support from Brown CS and numerous corporate sponsors, the event brought in 450 students from as far away …

by Michael MarkellHack@Brown, with support from Brown CS, is holding their third annual hackathon this weekend, February 6-7! The event will bring in 450 students from 84 schools, travelling from as far as the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, and Mexico, as well as 65 industry mentors, many of which are Brown alums. Governor …

"The field of computer science education," writes Megan Smith, the CTO of the United States, "has come a long way in just a few years." In her recent posting, she explicitly singles out Bootstrap, a CS education outreach program co-developed by Kathi Fisler (WPI and an adjunct at Brown CS), Shriram …

The number of new startups launched in the US each year is quickly increasing and many successful ones have been founded by recent CS graduates. Current and future students may be wondering how they too can succeed with a startup of their own. Brown CS has this in mind with …

by Kevin Stacey (Science News Officer, Physical Sciences)When North Korea conducted its recent nuclear weapon test, the blast had been detected by a global seismic sensing network operated by the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). The network, called the International Monitoring System, aims to “make sure …

Sometimes silence, perhaps unintentionally, speaks louder than words. Writing today in Lawfare, Timothy Edgar, a Visiting Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute, noted that neither cybersecurity nor surveillance nor encryption was mentioned once in President Barack Obama's State of the Union address last night."In past years," he writes, "Obama has sounded increasingly urgent warnings of …

“Ordinary people are being empowered,” says Professor Michael Littman of Brown University’s Department of Computer Science, “in a way that makes the experts unnecessary.” Coming from a thought leader whose research is helping create household gadgets that can be programmed in a user-friendly and natural way, it's not an unusual statement. Except in this …

"When things go wrong in today’s systems," writes Brown CS PhD student Jonathan Mace, "it can be difficult to answer questions about causes of failures, uncover dependencies between components, or understand performance or resource usage." Very few things are going wrong for Jonathan at the moment, nor is his recent performance difficult …