Software Development Agents are General Agents
7:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Davis Auditorium
Eno Reyes, Factory
Abstract:
This talk will explore the broad set of tasks a software development agent must be capable of doing to serve the product needs of our customers, and how we built them, alongside our journey to get to where we are today.
Bio:
Eno Reyes is co-founder and CTO of Factory, a Sequoia-backed startup building an enterprise platform for model-agnostic software development agents. He was previously an ML engineer at Hugging Face, where he helped Fortune 500 organizations manage and deploy LLMs.
This event is organized by Columbia's Data, Agents, and Processes Lab (DAPLab). For more information about the series, see https://daplab.cs.columbia.edu/entrepreneurship.
The Columbia Engineering AI Entrepreneurship Series is a bi-weekly speaker series that brings students and faculty at Columbia together with founders, VCs, technologists, and business leaders to learn about the process of transitioning lessons from research and the classroom into products and value.
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How to Close the 100,000-Year “Data Gap” in Robotics
11:40 AM to 12:40 PM
CSB 451 CS Auditorium
Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley
Abstract:
Large models based on internet-scale data can now pass the Turing Test for intelligence. In this sense, data has "solved" language and many analogously claim that data has solved speech recognition and computer vision. Will data also solve robotics and automation, allowing general-purpose humanoid robots to achieve human-level performance? Using commonly accepted metrics for converting word and image tokens into time, the amount of internet-scale data used to train contemporary large vision language models (VLMs) is on the order of 100,000 years. I’ll review 3 ways researchers are pursuing to close this gap, and a 4th approach, where data is collected as real robots operate in real commercial environments -- which requires bootstrapping with AI and "good old-fashioned engineering" to create robots with real return on investment that will be adopted by industry. Such robots can create a "data flywheel" to increase performance and enable new functionality, accelerating the timeline to achieve reliable, general-purpose robots.
Exams with More Learning and Less Stress with a Computer-Based Testing Facility
10:30 AM to 12:00 PM
CSB 453
Craig Ziles, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Abstract:
Exams are an important tool for summative assessment, whose utility has only grown with the advent of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, because they can be implemented in a trustworthy manner. But exams are generally not well liked by either students or faculty. Students find them stressful. For faculty (and their course staff), they represent a large administrative burden to write, proctor, and grade. This large burden means they are done infrequently in many classes, but this infrequent testing encourages cramming and leads to high test anxiety.
In this talk, I'll share (1) research on the benefits of frequent testing and "second-chance testing" (optional exam retakes) on increased student learning and decreased test anxiety, (2) research on patterns of cheating on unproctored online assessments, and (3) how we've reduced the instructor workload at Illinois to implement frequent testing through our Computer-Based Testing Facility (CBTF). The CBTF is a collection of proctored computer labs that, in conjunction with the PrairieLearn open-source question-asking platform, enable our faculty to run sophisticated exams with almost no recurring effort even in the largest classrooms. For example, our CS 1 course for majors (run by a single faculty member) ran weekly exams for 1,150 students. Key enabling ideas for the CBTF include: (1) sophisticated auto-grading questions, (2) question generators, (3) asynchronous exams, and (4) dedicated testing space and proctors. The CBTF has been running for over 10 years and proctored over 100,000 exams last semester.
Informational Session: Dandy
11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
CS Lounge
Dandy was created with one goal in mind: to modernize the dental lab process. Their platform is designed to level up practices by making the entire process effortlessly digital — from start to finish. They are actively recruiting for Machine Learning Engineer internships and full-time roles. Representatives will conduct an in-person Employer informational session and offer a presentation about their company, mission, past/upcoming projects and future recruitment efforts followed by a Q&A session. For more information regarding the company, please feel free to the company website: meetdandy.com
Registration Information will be posted via email, VMock and CampusGroups.
*Event Audience: CS Graduate Students (Ms/PhD) & Bridge Students.
2nd Coffee Chat Session x SAP - Global Vice President, Lockie Antonopoulos
2:00 PM to 3:00 PM
Virtual
Join us for the 2nd exclusive coffee chat with Lockie Antonopoulos, Global Vice President of Intelligent Spend and Business Network Value Advisory at SAP. Lockie brings decades of experience at the intersection of business and technology, with expertise in supply chain optimization, vendor management, and enterprise software integration. Known for fostering collaboration between IT and business units and driving innovation in business process engineering, he offers valuable insights into leading innovation in complex, global organizations.
Whether you're interested in technology strategy, enterprise solutions, leadership in global organizations, or advice on navigating the tech and business space, this conversation offers valuable perspectives and the chance to ask network and directly ask questions.
Registration Information will be posted via email, VMock and CampusGroups.
*Event Audience: CS Graduate Students (Ms/PhD) & Bridge Students.
PhD Day with Google
1:00 PM to 4:30 PM
Google will conduct a PhD Informational Session on Friday, November 14th, from 1:30-3 PM. They are actively recruiting for various intern and full-time Research and Engineering roles.
This candid conversation with Google's PhD software engineers will allow you to learn how research works at Google, the problems they're solving, and discover the path they took from their PhD to a career at Google.
Registration Information will be shared via email.
*Event Audience: PhD Students
Transcend On-Campus Interview Day
10:00 AM to 4:00 PM
CS Lounge
Transcend is the privacy infrastructure that unleashes growth for the world’s greatest brands. We automate data and consumer preference governance at the systems layer to unlock AI, personalized experiences, and growth with speed and confidence. We integrate directly into data and vendor ecosystems—automating & enforcing privacy, security, and governance policies in real time, across every system and every user interaction.
Transcend is actively recruiting for a Software Engineer role. They will be conducting On-Campus Interviews.
The application link posted via VMock and email.
*Event Audience: CS Columbia Graduate Students (MS & PhD)
Quantum Networks: A Classical Perspective
11:40 AM to 1:00 PM
CSB 451 CS Auditorium
Don Towsley, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract:
Quantum information processing is at the threshold of having significant impact on technology and society in the form of providing unbreakable security, ultra-high-precision distributed sensing, and polynomial/exponential speed-ups in computing. Many of these applications are enabled by high rate distributed shared entanglement between pairs and groups of users. A critical missing component that prevents crossing this threshold is a distributed infrastructure in the form of a world-wide “Quantum Internet”. This motivates the study of quantum networks, namely, to identify the right architecture and how should it operate, e.g., dynamic fair allocation of resources. Moreover, the architecture and network operation must account for operation in harsh, noisy environments.
This talk addresses the following question: what ideas can the design of a quantum network borrow from classical networks? At first glance the answer appears to be “very little”. The focus of this talk, however, is to argue that the opposite is true and that much can be borrowed from classical networks. We begin by reviewing two proposed quantum network architectures two-way and one-way architectures. A two-way network generates and distributes quantum entanglement to pairs or groups of users whereas a one-way network allows for direct transfer of quantum information from one user to another. We compare these architectures and conclude that a two-way architecture is superior. A two-way architecture appears very different from the classical Internet architecture. However, we will introduce a “connectionless” two-way quantum network architecture that allows one to easily adapt many ideas from classical networks (good and bad
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