Brown CS Blog

Brown's Data Science Institute (DSI) and the Center for Computation and Visualization (CCV) are putting together their Data Science, Computation, and Visualization (DSCoV) Workshops schedule for the spring semester, and they're looking for volunteers to give a workshop! 

As we celebrate 10 transformative years at Brown’s School of Professional Studies (SPS), we shine a light on the remarkable faculty and staff who have shaped our first decade and continue to help us go beyond, pushing boundaries and inspiring new possibilities.

For first-year PhD student Skyler Austen, cybersecurity education is the focus of his work with Brown CS under faculty member Kathi Fisler. Skyler took his research and, for the last few months, worked with a high school teacher from his home state of Arkansas, James Houston, to host a statewide hackathon for middle school students at the beginning of April.

Brown CS faculty member Maurice Herlihy is widely known for his work in practical and theoretical aspects of concurrent and distributed systems, but readers may be less familiar with one of his earliest research efforts. As a teenager, he traveled to Florence, Italy, where he helped his father, David Herlihy, on a project where he created punch cards based on data in the Florentine castato, or land registration system. 

Does a machine and a human understand empathy in the same way? Brown CS doctoral student Zainab Iftikhar and her collaborators suggest not entirely. The emergence of Chat-GPT has stirred up discussions around the essence of humanity in the world of artificial intelligence. Traditionally, humans have been recognized for their critical thinking, compassion, and empathy. However, a shift occurred as large language models joined the club, changing the focus of computational psychotherapy to use AI to develop models that write empathetically and blur the lines between human and machine understanding of empathy.

You’ve probably never seen infographics like these. If you have, did you ever dream of creating them yourself? They’re the work of Brown CS PhD student Tongyu Zhou. Advised by faculty member Jeff Huang, she was part of the team at Adobe that built Project Infograph It, a tool that allows laypeople to use generative AI to easily build customizable infographics from data sets and text prompts. At the recent Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, she took the stage alongside basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal for a keynote in which she rapidly turned a set of statistics from a fictional basketball …