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.
“Once you you get people on board with the idea that we should do something about making sure our systems are fair and unbiased and accountable, the next obvious question is how do you do that?” says Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian, who premiered CSCI 1951z, Fairness in Automated Decision-Making, last fall. “This class is really trying to answer that.”
A member of Brown CS (entered class of 1991, graduated class of 2011), Lisa Gelobter is the CEO and the founder of a tech startup called tEQuitable that uses technology to make workplaces more equitable. tEQuitable’s mission is to help companies create a safe, inclusive and equitable workplace. They provide a confidential sounding board for employees to address and resolve interpersonal conflict, specializing in micro-aggressions and micro-inequities, and they provide data and insights to companies to identify and improve systemic workplace culture issues.
In the current issue of ACM Interactions Magazine, Assistant Professor of Practice Ian Gonsher presents a collection of prototypes developed at the intersection of robotics, ubiquitous computing, mixed reality, and furniture design. These design research projects also call attention to inequalities between local and remote telepresence users, and offer viable alternatives away from the dominant paradigm of personal devices towards the development of extended reality infrastructure as a public good.
"Pivoting is a lot of what I do," Brown CS Research Associate Tom Sgouros says of a current project. It began in a familiar research area, virtual reality, and evolved in two different directions, resulting in work that offered unexpected depths along the route to an important and often neglected goal: aiding the visually impaired.
A member of the Brown CS class of 2013, Jonah Kagan is a software engineer at VotingWorks, a small nonprofit organization dedicated to building reliable, open-source election technology like voting machines, ballot scanners, and election-auditing software. When asked about the skills he uses for his career, Kagan explained that the knowledge learned in his very first computer science class, CSCI 0190 Accelerated Introduction to Computer Science, has helped him in his day-to-day life.
A member of the Brown CS class of 2017, Atty Eleti spent his time at Brown University organizing various hackathons for Hack@Brown, in the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant (UTA) mentorship program for computer science courses discussing topics such as distributed systems and discrete mathematics, and in the International Mentoring Program helping international students become acclimatized to the university’s community. Atty also augmented his CS degree with Brown’s curriculum and took graphic design courses at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
In 2022, generative AI went mainstream. Mere months ago, it still seemed exclusively the province of the ML research community and of Twitter, where meme accounts like @weirddalle shared the results of feeding text-to-image generation models off-the-wall prompts like "a bottle of ranch dressing testifying in court."
Cut to the present, where generative AI startups like Stability AI and Jasper are raising $100 million rounds of funding, big players like Microsoft have announced upcoming integrations of text-to-image generation, and perhaps all of us have used OpenAI's DALL-E 2 to create create something delightful like this "chicken nugget dressed as a …
"One huge highlight of my work is the effect and impact my projects have had on others,” says Brown CS alum Jemma Issroff, whose career path has allowed her to work on a wide variety of projects as podcast host, author, and backend software developer. She’s an excellent example of someone who’s able to work on highly technical challenges while still having an effect on the communities that matter to her. After several different experiences as a programmer, Jemma has found a home at Shopify, doing work that she feels has a true impact on users.
