Middle-Schoolers Are Ready, Ready, Ready for Programming Adventure
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A RESEARCH AND ALUMNI NEWS MAGAZINE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE BROWN UNIVERSITY Middle-Schoolers Are Ready, Ready, Ready for Programming Adventure Also inside: ■ CS Women Take Exception To Being Typecast ■ Tunnels, Bunkers and Nukes: My Underground Vacation Spring | Summer 2011 Van Hentenryck on their new books: Tom’s Notes from the Chair: Operating Systems in Depth: Design and Pro- the Latest News from gramming and Pascal’s Hybrid Optimization: The Ten Years of CPAIOR. My book Introduc- 115 Waterman tion to Computer Security (coauthored with Mi- chael Goodrich) was also recently published. We are thrilled to Greetings to all CS alums, supporters and add these three vol- friends. umes to the de- partment’s library The spring semester is flying by and the CIT is of faculty-penned bustling with activity. Wonderful things continue books. More on to happen in the department and I am thrilled Pascal and Tom’s to be able to share the highlights with you. books can be found As part of a review of all departments and cen- on page 14. ters being conducted by the university, our de- It is with mixed partment underwent a review late last semester. feelings that I announce the departures of Mi- We are encouraged that strengths were found in chael Black and Meinolf Sellmann. Both have all major dimensions of research, teaching, ad- moved on to exciting opportunities: Michael ministration, and outreach. Based on feedback is a Director of a newly established Max Planck from the reviewers and from the university’s Ac- Institute in Tübingen, Germany and Meinolf ademic Priorities Committee, we plan to broad- is the Group Leader of AI for Optimization at en the horizon of our strategic planning efforts IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York. and to experiment with new models of depart- We will miss them as colleagues and we wish mental governance. them continued success in their new endeavors. I am excited to report that our enrollments We’d also like to congratulate Lawrence Lar- continue to climb. Overall enrollment is up son on his appointment as the School of Engi- 12% from the previous academic year and up neering’s founding Dean, effective July 1, 2011. a whopping 38% from the 2007-08 academic Dr. Larson is currently the Chair of the Depart- year. We are thrilled that so many students have ment of Electrical and Computer Engineering taken an interest in our program and hope to at the University of California, San Diego and is continue to see that number climb over time. the first holder of the Communications Industry Congratulations are in order for Philip Klein, Chair. He is an expert in microelectronics tech- who has been named a Fellow of the Associa- nology and wireless communications. The de- tion for Computing Machinery for his work on partment looks forward to a strong partnership graph and network algorithms. We are delight- with the School of Engineering. ed to see his research leadership recognized by Finally, please share your professional and per- this prestigious honor. sonal stories for inclusion in upcoming issues of Several new courses are being offered this se- Conduit. Your support of and participation in mester, including Computational Topology with departmental activities are always appreciated John “Spike” Hughes, Creating Modern Web and we are grateful to have such a close commu- Applications with Steve Reiss, and Cybersecuri- nity—thank you! ty and International Relations with John Savage. Also, Pascal Van Hentenryck’s course on Solving Roberto Tamassia Hard Problems in Combinatorial Optimization Plastech Professor of Computer Science has been redesigned. You can read more about Chair, Department of Computer Science Pascal’s and Spike’s courses on page 20. Look for more information on John’s course in the next issue of Conduit. Congratulations to Tom Doeppner and Pascal Volume 20, Number 1 Spring | Summer 2011 Published twice yearly by the Department of Computer Science at Brown University, Conduit is distributed free to all computer science alumni, faculty, staff, students and industrial partners. Queries about this publication can be directed to: or 115 Waterman Street Campus Box 1910 Providence, RI 02912 PUBLISHER Industrial Partners Program, FEATURES Department of Computer Science CS Women Take Exception ..........................................Page 4 Bootstrap ..................................................................................................page 6 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Amy Tarbox Travelogue .................................................................................................page 8 GRAPHIC DESIGN FACULTY Brown Graphic Services The Faculty Speak Out ..............................................................................page 12 Faculty Notes ............................................................................................page 13 FE AT URED COLUMNISTS Books .......................................................................................................page 14 Nell Elliott and Alexandra Schultz Richard Lewis Jennie Duggan DEPARTMENT NEWS AND HAPPENINGS Tom Doeppner Çagatay Demiralp Department Awards and Honors ...............................................................page 15 Carleton Coffrin 10th Annual Kanellakis Memorial Lecture ................................................page 19 Recent Ph.D.s ...........................................................................................page 19 CONDU¡T ON THE WEB New Courses.............................................................................................page 20 John Bazik Kathy Kirman ALUMNI PRINTING AND DISTRIBUTION Alumni Update .........................................................................................page 22 Brett Turner, Information Services Ping! ................................................................................................. BACK COVER Brown Graphic Services 25% Conduit is printed on Burgo’s ChorusArt, an acid free and elemental chlorine free paper containing Cert no. SCS-COC-001154 50% recycled content and 15% post-consumer waste. You are the difference – reduce, reuse, recycle. 3 Condu¡t Spring | Summer 2011 Faculty CS Women taKE EXception to being typecast By Nell Elliott and Alexandra Schultz (We wrote this piece to address misconceptions carried out through the use of computing pow- in the Brown Daily Herald’s February 16 article er. It’s much more than sitting at a computer and programming – it requires an understand- “Algorithms Can’t Solve CS Gender Gap,” by ing of how to store and manipulate information; Sahil Luthra. Note that “we” refers to the co- how to model both real-world and abstract, the- authors, not “every woman in Brown’s CS oretical problems; and techniques to solve these department”—we two don’t claim that all female problems in practice. In discussing an introduc- tory CS class at Harvey Mudd, Luthra claims that computer scientists feel exactly the way we “the focus of the class switched from Java pro- do. However, the number of professors and gramming to computer-based problem solv- students who asked us to write this, as well as ing.” This misguided statement only perpetuates the amount of positive response we received, the misconception that CS is equivalent to pro- gramming, and that programming and problem speak to the widespread discontent at the solving are discrete entities. In fact, one writes Herald’s gross misrepresentation of Brown’s CS programs as a problem-solving tool; for example, department, being a female computer scientist, students in CSCI0150, Brown’s largest introduc- and the field of Computer Science in general.) tory CS class, formulate and implement problem solutions as programs in Java. The Herald illustrates a national deficit of wom- Next, we want to clarify what it’s actually like en in computer science by citing the CS enroll- to study Computer Science at Brown; fantas- ments at Brown and other schools. There’s no ar- tic! Being a computer scientist is incredibly chal- guing with the numbers, but speculating about lenging, fun, and rewarding. Despite the wide- the cause of the problem through numbers alone ly propagated stereotype that programmers are is an inherently misguided and error-prone ap- Mountain Dew-guzzling, Dorito-inhaling, anti- proach. Thus, it’s not surprising that the Herald’s social hermits, our department is a close-knit article lacked an eye-opening, fair, or even accu- group of genuinely friendly, passionate people. rate depiction of being a female CS student. Like Between the two of us we have TAed nearly every many writings on this topic, the article discusses incoming student over the past three years, and the underrepresentation of women in the scienc- an overwhelming number of our students have es, and how it can be difficult to be a woman in a remarked upon the department’s sense of com- field largely comprised of men. Yet it says nothing munity. When surrounded by such a welcoming about the positive experiences of female CS stu- atmosphere and immersed in fascinating proj- dents – students like us. ects, why should it matter that fellow females are Before we address the “women in CS” topic, it’s few and far between? important that readers understand what exact- Which brings us to the question: what is it like ly CS is. Put simply, CS is problem solving that is 4 Condu¡t Spring | Summer 2011 Faculty to be a woman in CS at Brown? Honestly, being women in the department simply does not de- fine our experiences here. In fact, the top five groups within the CS department