Scaling RL Rollouts: Agent-Native Infrastructure with Daytona
11:30 AM to 1:00 PM
Davis Auditorium
Ivan Burazin
Abstract:
In this talk, we’ll outline why a new class of agent-native infrastructure is emerging, what problems it is designed to solve, and the core use cases driving it, from autonomous coding agents to large-scale evaluation and training workloads. Daytona is an agent-native control plane designed to orchestrate isolated, stateful sandbox environments at scale. We’ll break down the infrastructure challenges behind isolation, state management, and massive parallelism, and why traditional VM and container stacks fall short. As a concrete example, we’ll walk through scaling RL rollouts, showing how tens of thousands of environments can be provisioned and orchestrated in minutes as part of a high-throughput RL pipeline.
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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Hack-a-Technical Interview with Visa
12:30 PM to 1:30 PM
CS Lounge
Visa will host an exclusive workshop to provide students with valuable insight into its recruiting and application process. This session is a great opportunity to gain a competitive edge and better understand what it takes to stand out as a candidate. During the workshop, the Visa team will walk through the application process in detail, share insider strategies on how to differentiate yourself, and provide an in-depth breakdown of interview preparation. Recruiters will also offer guidance on strengthening your resume and effectively positioning your experiences. Don’t miss this opportunity to connect directly with the recruiting team, ask questions, and gain clarity on how to navigate future recruiting cycles with confidence.
Registration Information will be posted via email, VMock and CampusGroups.
*Event Audience: CS Graduate Students (MS/PhD) & Bridge Students
Blackrock Coffee Chat Session
11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Zoom
Join us for an exclusive coffee chat with Shi Tak (Dave) Man, BlackRock senior engineering leader who brings over 17 years of experience delivering large-scale initiatives from concept through launch across global teams. With 14 years of people management experience, they offer extensive expertise in leadership, team development, and project execution. This is an excellent opportunity for students to gain insights into engineering career paths, effective leadership, and leading impactful, cross-functional work.
If you would like to be considered for a small group coffee chat session with Shi Tak (Dave), please complete the Google interest form. The form has been distributed via email and VMock. Deadline to complete the form is Monday, February 23rd at 4 PM ET.
*Event Audience: CS Graduate Students (MS/PhD) & Bridge Students.
Foundations of Language Models: Scaling and Reasoning
11:50 AM to 1:00 PM
CSB 451 CS Auditorium
Eshaan Nichani, Princeton University
Abstract:
Modern deep learning methods, most prominently language models, have achieved tremendous empirical success, yet a theoretical understanding of how neural networks learn from data remains incomplete. While reasoning directly about these approaches is often intractable, formalizing core empirical phenomena through minimal “sandbox” tasks offers a promising path toward principled theory. In this talk, I demonstrate how proving end-to-end learning guarantees for such tasks can provide a practical understanding of how the network architecture, optimization algorithm, and data distribution jointly give rise to key behaviors. First, I will show how neural scaling laws arise from the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent in shallow neural networks. Next, I will study how and under what conditions transformers trained via gradient descent can learn different reasoning primitives, including in-context learning and multi-step reasoning. Altogether, this approach builds theories which yield concrete insight into the behavior of modern AI systems.
Hook - Informational Session
1:30 PM to 2:30 PM
Hook - an innovative music technology company will be hosting an informational session. They are hiring for a Product + Frontend Intern. Representatives will offer a presentation about their company, mission, past/upcoming projects, and future recruitment efforts, followed by a Q&A session.
Registration Information will be posted via email, VMock and CampusGroups.
*Event Audience: CS Graduate Students (MS/PhD) & Bridge Students
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