Members of the CS department, including Pedro Felzenszwalb , James Hays , Chad Jenkins , Michael Littman   and Eli Upfal , participated in the Initiative in Human-Robot Interaction’s inaugural symposium on Monday, December 10. The symposium was organized by Chad, Michael, and Bertram Malle (CLPS) and was sponsored by the Department of Computer Science, the Digital Society Initiative, the Research Initiatives Office, and the Technology Ventures Office. The theme of the event was Fundamental Problems and Societal Solutions.

The symposium’s goal was to build a broad network of Brown scholars whose work speaks to issues of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and to draw ...

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, recently elevated Roberto Tamassia to Fellow for “contributions to graph drawing, algorithms and data structures and to computer science education.”

Roberto, who joined the department in 1988, works on information security, design and analysis of algorithms, graph drawing, geometric computing, data management, and information visualization. He is the Plastech Professor of Computer Science and the Chair of the Department. He is also the Director of Brown’s Center for Geometric Computing. He has published textbooks on the subjects of algorithms, data structures, graph drawing, and ...

On December 6, 2012, Cynthia Dwork, Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research, delivered the 12th Annual Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Lecture. This lecture series has been held annually by the department in honor of Paris on or around his birthday. In a standing-room only lecture, Dr. Dwork kindly devoted an introduction to Paris, mentioning their close friendship and how much she misses both him and his wife, Maria Teresa Otoya.

The talk, titled “Differential Privacy: Thwarting Big Data’s Evil Twin,” discussed the problem of how to reveal accurate statistics about a population, while still preserving the privacy of individuals. Differential ...