its content.
WHEN IS THE PEN MIGHTIER THAN THE KEYBOARD?
A R E S E A R C H A N D
A L U M N I N E W S M A G A Z I N E
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
BROWN UNIVERSITY
WHEN IS THE PEN
MIGHTIER THAN
THE KEYBOARD?
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Alan Kay's Dynabook Vision Notes from the Chair:
the Latest News from 115 Waterman
Greetings to all CS alums, supporters and friends!
We are well into the second semester of the year and are as busy as
ever. Great things continue to happen in the department and I am
thrilled to be able to share the highlights with you.
Amy Greenwald and Anna Lysyanskaya will be promoted to Associate
Professor with tenure, effective July 1, 2008. Amys research focuses
on game-theoretic arti cial intelligence. Her honors include a Sloan
Research Fellowship, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists
and Engineers and an NSF CAREER award. Anna works in the area
of cryptography. She is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship
and an NSF CAREER Award. She has been included in the 2007
TR35, Technology Reviews list of 35 innovators in science and
technology under the age of 35. Congratulations to Amy and Anna!
The rst few months of the year also brought a number of awards
and honors to our faculty and students. Congratulations are in
order for the following people: Michael Black, recipient of a grant
from the Rhode Island Science and Technology Advisory Council;
Anna Lysyanskaya, who has been awarded a Sloan Research
Fellowship; Claire Mathieu, recipient of the 2007 INFORMS
Computing Society prize; Ben Raphael, selected for a Brown
Career Development Award; Andy van Dam, appointed as chair of
CRAs new Education Committee; Yanif Ahmad, recipient of an
IBM Ph.D. Fellowship; and Colin Gordon 08, selected for Honor-
able Mention in the Computing Research Associations Outstand-
ing Undergraduate Award competition for 2008. More details
about these awards can be found within this publication.
Congratulations are also in order for Lauren Clarke, who is now
the faculty and student affairs manager. Lauren is new to the
position but not to the department, having worked with Andy van
Dam and his research team for the past three years. We are
delighted to have her assume this new role. With Lauren moving
on, Rachel Reisner has joined the staff as Andy van Dams
executive assistant.
The department currently has eight talented post-doctoral
researchers who collaborate with faculty members on new
exciting research directions: Manuel Cebri�n, Gr�goire Dooms, Ivan Dotu and Yannis
Vergados work with Pascal Van Hentenryck in the optimization
laboratory. The lab aims at pushing the frontiers of optimization
technology, from its theoretical foundations, to the design of
fundamental algorithms, the implementation of pioneering
optimization platforms, and innovative applications in various
domains. Jian Chen and Daniel Keefe are part of David Laidlaws Visual-
ization Research Lab which focuses on developing ways to
visualize a range of problems and phenomena from science as
well as the arts and humanities. Sung-Phil Kim is working with
Michael Black on several
research areas including the
analysis and design of mathe-
matical decoding models used
for neural prostheses and data
mining and feature extractions
in neural population activities. Fumei Lam is working in the
Center for Computational
Molecular Biology, directed by Sorin Istrail. Her research focuses on
the human genome and the genetic basis of disease. Working with Andy van Dam in the Microsoft Center for Research
on Pen-Centric Computing, Chuanjun Li investigates the recogni-
tion of various 2D handwritten notations for pen-centric computing.
Our quest to expand the CS curriculum continues with a new
course, Programming for Digital Art & Literature. A joint effort
between CS and Literary Arts at Brown and Digital+Media at RISD,
this course explores advanced tools and techniques for the
creation of innovative and expressive works of digital art by
applying best practices from the software design community to the
context of digital media. Students from both Brown and RISD are
currently taking the course, which is taught by Daniel C. Howe, a
digital artist and researcher from NYUs Media Research Lab who
received a Masters from Browns literary arts program in 2007.
In other recent news, Brown has joined forces with more than a
dozen research universities and historically black colleges and
universities to promote robotics and computer science education
for African-American students. At Brown, Chad Jenkins is spear-
heading the program, which will develop outreach programs to
encourage African-American students at both the K-12 and college
levels to pursue careers in computer science and robotics. The
program also provides mentoring programs for undergraduates.
Recently, the department received a substantial gift from an
anonymous alum. We are very grateful for this contribution, which
will help to support such initiatives as the Artemis Project and the
Women in Computer Science group. Gifts sent to the department
directly bene t CS students and faculty members who keep Brown
at the forefront of information technology research.
Finally, we urge you to contribute your professional and
personal stories for inclusion in upcoming issues of the Conduit.
Your support of and participation in department activities is
always appreciated and we are grateful to have such a tight knit
communitythank you!
Roberto Tamassia
Professor and Chair
Department of Computer Science
Brown University
Spring|Summer 2008 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: conduit@cs.brown.edu or
115 Waterman Street
Campus Box 1910
Providence, RI 02912
P U B L I S H E R
Industrial Partners Program,
Department of Computer Science
E D I T O R - I N - C H I E F
Amy Tarbox
G R A P H I C D E S I G N
Mary D. Norris
C O P Y E D I T O R
Erin Klopfenstein
F E A T U R E D C O L U M N I S T S
John Cayley
Shriram Krishnamurthi
Matthew Loper
C O N D U � T O N T H E W E B
John Bazik
Kathy Kirman
P R I N T I N G A N D D I S T R I B U T I O N
Brett Turner, Information Services
Brown Graphic Services
F E AT U R E
When is the Pen Mightier
Than the Keyboard?
Andy van Dam and Rosemary Simpson
P A G E 4
R E S E A R C H
Robots: The Great Divide
P A G E 1 2
F A C U L T Y
The Faulty Speaks Out
P A G E 14
Faculty Notes
P A G E 16
D E PA R T M E N T N E W S A N D H A P P E N I N G S
Department Awards and Honors
P A G E 1 9
Fall 2007 Symposium: Security & Privacy
P A G E 2 3
Expressive Programming
P A G E 24

New Faces: Rachel Reisner
P A G E 2 5
Seventh Annual Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Lecture
P A G E 2 5
Parenthetically Speaking
P A G E 2 6
Named UTRA supports CS-Music Collaboration
P A G E 2 9
Dancing with the Profs
P A G E 3 0
Recent Ph.D.s
P A G E 3 0
A L U M N I
Alumni Update
P A G E 31
P I N G ! B A C K C O V E R
Conduit is printed on Burgos ChorusArt, an acid free and elemental chlorine free paper containing
50% recycled content and 15% post-consumer waste. You are the difference reduce, reuse, recycle.
Volume 17, Number 1
Spring|Summer 2008
Photo of Roberto Tamassia on
page 2: Peter Goldberg
Cover design: Mary D. Norris
3 Condu�t Spring
| Summer 2008 In the late 1960s, during the heyday of big iron, Andy van Dam was
inspired by Turing Award winner Alan Kays then science ction
vision of a personal electronic notebook, the DynaBook (see Kays
original sketch in Figure 1 above). It was to be portable, multi-modal
(speech, pen and nger, virtual keyboard), collaborative, and
simulation-based
1
. The DynaBook would be network-enabled, both
local and remote, and would provide interactive and integrated text,
graphics, sound, and animations with an intuitive graphical interface
useable not only by adults, but even more radically, by children.
In recent years the advent of the Tablet PC has opened possibilities
for revisiting and expanding the ideas incorporated in Kays original
vision. (Figure 2, above, shows Faculty and Student Affairs Manager
Lauren Clarkes
daughter Danielle writing and playing music with the
Music Notepad running on a Tablet PC). While some aspects of Kays
vision have been realized with the current generation of Tablet PCs,
many areas remain to be addressed and many aspects of our current
vision and context are outside of the original notion. For example,
while Kay included local and remote networks, he did not describe
ubiquitous computing in which notebooks were integrated with vastly
different form factors such as modern cell phones, smart white-
boards, and even smart rooms.
In the Fall 2005 issue of Conduit article Next Generation Educational
Software: Issues and Possibilities,
2
where we discussed the educational
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SKETCH (1996)
Robert Zeleznik, Ken Herndon, and
John Hughes
Legend: The gure shows a room that was drawn using SKETCH
Description: The goal of SKETCH is to combine the advantages of both
hand-drawn sketching and precise computer modeling in order to create
an environment