Brown CS Blog

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 …

Rising cinematically in glory beside the Brihadeeswarar Temple of Thanjavur, Barcelona's Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, and the Kansai ryokans: the Carrie Tower, the Independent Man, and the Big Blue Bug? After ranking Providence with global peers in its "52 Places to Go in 2016", the New York Times might agree. "This cobblestone-lined capital," …

In addition to advancing the field at a local and national level, Brown CS community members have a global impact on education and research. For more articles on Brown CS around the world click here.The second World Internet Conference, organized by Chinese officials to discuss Internet issues and policy, was held this …

For more CS News and CS Blog articles about the Yurt, please click here."It’s a whole new world at Brown," writes Jenny Currier of Motif after visiting the Yurt, "a virtual world ready to be utilized by inquiring minds. Anyone who can benefit from such technology is encouraged to get in touch, …

Former Brown CS student Dylan Field is the co-founder of Figma, which he launched with alum Evan Wallace '12. It's a tool that he hopes will transform the way teams collaborate in designing user interfaces. Figma automatically saves projects to the cloud with every change, allowing groups to make comments, edit design features, and review past versions, all …

"Rubio is almost certainly off by orders of magnitude," says Timothy Edgar, a Visiting Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute. He was recently consulted by Politifact in an article critiquing Senator Marco Rubio's claim that 700,000 Americans could be unjustly prevented from buying guns by a bill that would use a …

Professor Amy Greenwald of Brown University's Department of Computer Science delivered opening remarks and made multiple other contributions to a workshop she helped found that's celebrating a proud anniversary: Women In Machine Learning (WiML) turned ten this year. Amy made a significant founding contribution to the workshop by writing the initial …