RandomnessRandomness isis Beautiful:Beautiful: inin SearchSearch ofof vonvon NeumannNeumann Spring/Summer 2006 Notes from the Chair: the Latest News from 115 Waterman Greetings to All CS Alums, Supporters Gregory Harm ‘06, Honorable Mention for the and Friends! Computing Research Association’s Outstanding The 2006 academic year is coming to a close, and in Undergraduate Award; and Andy van Dam, true fashion, the computer science department is for his work in the creation of the Microsoft abuzz with activity. The spring semester has Center for Research on Pen-Centric Computing. brought some significant changes for us—some Additional details about these awards, and resulting in great joy and others with disappoint- others, can be found within this publication. ment. Enrollment Staffing Changes We are pleased to observe that after several After twenty-five years of service to Brown and years of declining undergraduate enrollments in the department, Trina Avery retired this March. computer science nationwide, the trend is now A wonderful send-off was held at the Faculty reversing for our department. Recent recruiting Club which featured heartfelt memories shared events for both newly accepted undergraduate by past chairs and colleagues (see photos and students and those interested in pursuing a a piece by Peter Wegner on page 31). While computer science concentration have been we regret Trina’s departure, we have warmly very successful. Thanks are extended to Tom welcomed the arrival of Jennifer Crockett Doeppner, Teresa McRann ’06, and the staff and as the new executive officer. Jennifer was the student volunteers whose assistance made these former assistant director of the Center for events so successful. We are also pleased to note Materials Science and Engineering (CMSE) that we continue to make progress in expanding at MIT and most recently, the director of the Sc.M. program and hope to heighten the government cost compliance at the University visibility of both full-time and part-time study of Cincinnati. She holds a M.B.A. from Suffolk options in the near future. University. We have high expectations that Alumni Outreach Jennifer will successfully transition the depart- ment to meet the ever-increasing needs of our Be sure to mark Saturday, May 27th, 2006 as the faculty, staff and students. date of the next Computer Science Reunion and Networking Reception. We encourage all alums, We would also like to acknowledge that Jennet friends and supporters to make plans to attend. Kirschenbaum, who provided secretarial support As those who attended last year’s event can attest, to the department since its inception, and was, it’s certain to be a fantastic time! Please register most recently, the executive assistant to the chair, for the reunion at: has departed Brown. We will miss her presence www.cs.brown.edu/events/reunion/home.html. and departmental knowledge immensely. Finally, I’d like to offer a “job well done!” to Finally, congratulations are offered to Lauren Conduit Editor-in-Chief Laura Zurowski for her Relyea who was promoted to faculty and student efforts in re-designing this publication over the affairs manager in January. Lauren has done past year. Our goal for Conduit is to provide a wonderful work with the various aspects of forum for those Brown alums interested in the graduate recruiting, and we look forward to her technology research that our faculty, students involvement in all of our academic programs. and alums are engaged in—and we hope that Faculty Accolades you enjoy each issue. We urge you to submit your comments, contribute your research and The first months of the new year brought a personal stories, and become involved with the number of awards and honors to our faculty growth and evolution of this publication. Your and students. Congratulations are in order for support and participation are always appreciated. the following people: Shriram Krishnamurthi, promoted to associate professor with tenure; Keep in touch! Maurice Herlihy, named ACM Fellow; Amy Greenwald, receipt of Sloan Fellowship; Chad Jenkins and Meinolf Sellmann, selected Eli Upfal for Brown University’s Salomon Award; Chair, Computer Science Department Volume 15, Number 1 Spring|Summer 2006 Published twice yearly by the Department FEATURE of Computer Science at Brown University, Conduit is distributed free to all computer science alumni, faculty, staff, students and Randomness is Beautiful: industrial partners. Queries about this publication can be in Search of von Neumann directed to: [email protected] Sorin Istrail…PAGE 10 Our campus mailing address is: 115 Waterman Street RESEARCH Campus Box 1910 Learning Autonomous Robot Control from Demonstration…PAGE 4 Providence, RI 02912 Ph.D. Profiles…PAGE 5 Computer Games and Formal Learning Programs…PAGE 6 PUBLISHER Simulation Philosophies…PAGE 8 Industrial Partners Program, Faster Seeking with Dumbledore…PAGE 9 Department of Computer Science FACULTY Faculty Notes…PAGE 16 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Awards and Honors…PAGE 20 Laura Zurowski Microsoft Center for Research on Pen-Centric Computing…PAGE 21 Remembering Paris: The Kanellakis Fellowships…PAGE 22 FACULTY EDITOR Wandering the Web…PAGE 23 Eugene Charniak 3.4.5. Winter 2005 IPP Symposium: Managing the Fire Hose…PAGE 24 COPY EDITOR Unplugged…PAGE 26 Amy Leavitt Brown-Harvard-MIT Natural Language Process (NLP) Workshop…PAGE 27 Parenthetically Speaking…PAGE 28 Tired of BOCA? Try Mocha!…PAGE 29 GRAPHIC DESIGN Department News and Happenings…PAGE 30 John deWolf, Public Information Design ALUMNI SPOCs Speak Out…PAGE 32 CONDU¡T ON THE WEB John Bazik True Tales from the Tech World…PAGE 34 Kathy Kirman Computer Science Department’s Fundraising Initiative …PAGE 38 Alumni Reunion and Events…PAGE 39 Ping!…BACK COVER PRINTING AND DISTRIBUTION Brett Turner and the wonderful folks at Graphic Services! Cover photo: Andy Deans Cover design: John deWolf 3 Condu¡t • Spring | Summer 2006 Research Learning Autonomous Robot Control from Demonstration Assistant Professor Chad Jenkins’ In recent years, technological advancements learning their functional relationship. By observ- research leverages the idea that robot have resulted in more capable robot hardware ing a human demonstrator, our systems attempt control and computational perception with increasingly broad applicability through to learn the function exhibited by the human are better learned from human society, such as Sony’s AIBO and iRobot’s that produces motor commands from the data demonstration rather than explicit Roomba. Despite the great strides in sensing, provided by the robot’s sensors. Once learned, computer programming. actuation, and computation, developing the robot uses this sensory-motor function to autonomous control policies (programs to autonomously assess situational context, assign control the robot) has remained a difficult tasks to robots, and perform the learned tasks problem in robotics. A robot is defined as a at run-time. In addition, we seek to develop machine (embodied in some physical form) methods that allow a robot to generalize and that uses a control policy to act (or actuate its refine a learned policy for new situations and motors) based on information about its environ- better performance in familiar scenarios. ment (provided by its sensors). Even when restricted to highly constrained domains, the RoboCup manual crafting of a robot control policy can be One interesting application of this work is in the a tedious and time-consuming endeavor requir- domain of robot soccer, specifically, RoboCup. ing a considerable amount of technical skill. RoboCup is a worldwide research and education Furthermore, such controllers often lack scalabil- initiative focused on advancing the state-of-the- ity for modifying the robot’s behavior as new art through annual robotic soccer competitions. or unforeseen functionality becomes desired. Unlike typical competitions (e.g., FIRST, A viable approach to develop- BattleBots), the robots operate in full autonomy ment of autonomous robot without external control or resources. The controllers is learning them high-level goal of RoboCup is to foster artificial from human demonstration. intelligence and robotics research with respect Human beings are apt at to a standard problem. The dream of this devising control policies that initiative is to develop a team of humanoid yield functional behavior in a robots capable of winning against the official dynamic environment, which is human WorldCup Champion before 2050. especially true for video games. During the fall of 2005, the Brown RoboCup Unfortunately, most humans team was established to field competitive robot are unable to transfer their soccer teams and explore methods for learning expertise onto the robot. The soccer skills and strategies from demonstrations. While several RoboCup leagues exist for ABOVE Brown’s two RoboCup teams will use the Sony Aibo. Teams barrier exists because explic- different aspects of the greater challenge, we of four dogs will compete against each other in a soccer match. itly programming a computer focus on the Sony Four-Legged Robot League, BELOW Robo-Dog makes a save! (and the fans go wild...) language is often required for robot programming and most where Sony Aibo robots play in teams of four. people are With the support of a Brown Salomon grant, not computer programmers. Brown RoboCup is sending two teams, Brown # Our aim is to implicitly (read: Pound) and DemonstraDogs, to compete transfer human expertise into in the RoboCup US Open, our first competition, robot control policies through in Atlanta this April. The Brown # uses manually human-robot collaboration or programmed control routines created by our de- instruction. velopment team of Sc.M. students including cap- Our research in this area aims tain, Ethan Leland, and programmers Brendan to extend methods for Dickinson and Mark Moseley. DemonstraDogs learning from demonstration leverages the research of doctoral student Dan towards applicability for Grollman to learn soccer control policies from general sets of tasks and multi- human teleoperation of robot teams. robot domains. That is, given a set of sensory inputs and corresponding motor outputs, 4 Condu¡t • Spring | Summer 2006 Research Ph.D.