Brown CS Blog

In another story from the latest issue of Conduit, our annual magazine, Brown CS undergraduate Robayet Hossain talks about his experience working with Brown CS faculty member Nora Ayanian's Automatic Coordination
of Teams (ACT) Lab.

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.

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 …

On a trip to Athens as a Fulbright scholar in 2008, Brown CS alum Peter Revesz, now a professor in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s School of Computing with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies, remembered his conversations with the late Paris Kanellakis, a Brown CS faculty member. They ultimately led to his deciphering a series of enigmatic ancient inscriptions, including 28 Minoan Linear A texts, the Phaistos Disk, and most recently, the inscription on a 3rd-century Roman statue of a sphinx that has baffled scholars for almost two centuries.