Brown CS Blog

Thinking about Tom, and our work together in the Department, several passionate themes come to mind – so many that I’ve only been able to write them at this final moment.

This summer, on a grant from Brown's Startup Fellowship program, Eric Xia developed www.word.golf with Julian Beaudry, a fellow CS undergraduate. They've done their best to follow a spirit of inquiry, creating a project which challenges the imagination while retaining a sense of familiarity and playfulness.

I was one of 26 Brown students among the 2,500 invited to the Y Combinator AI Startup School. Engulfing an entire warehouse in San Francisco, the event featured incredible speakers, leaving me with new insights about Silicon Valley and Brown’s unique elements and the future of AI ventures.

Brown University doctoral student Zainab Iftikhar is the friend people turn to when they need to talk. 

“My family jokes that I’m the ‘therapist friend’ everyone calls when they have a problem,” Iftikhar said. 

Her capacity for caregiving has informed her research at Brown, where she is focused on exploring technology’s therapeutic strengths and weaknesses to find ways people can best use AI to support social and mental health. Her research has spotlighted humans’ inherent ability to offer and detect empathy, which is something that chatbots, text-based therapists and other artificial intelligence systems don’t do well, she said. 

The chatbots routinely violated core mental health ethics standards, underscoring the need for legal standards and oversight.

In a new article, The Brown Daily Herald talks to Brown CS faculty member Ellie Pavlick about Brown's new AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants (ARIA), funded by a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study human-artificial intelligence interactions and mental health. 

A new imaging technique turns motion blur into an advantage, using a jiggling camera and a clever algorithm to create super-resolution images sharper than would be possible with a steady camera.

Michael is working with colleagues to develop guidance for using AI in the classroom, looking for new opportunities in AI-enabled research and identifying how AI might help the University run even more effectively.

Two new classes offered through Brown’s Cogut Institute for the Humanities add critical and historical context to deep questions surrounding artificial intelligence and large language models.

Creative, charming, and modern? That's us, and it's part of why USA Today declared Providence's the nation's second most walkable city to visit.