Discover What’s Next at the 2025 Distinguished Lecture Series

The Distinguished Lecture Series showcases pioneering thinkers whose work is driving the future of technology. From breakthroughs in theory to real-world applications that shape our daily lives, this year’s speakers will share insights at the forefront of computing. The series offers a unique opportunity to learn from leaders in the field, spark new ideas, and connect with the innovations transforming our world.

October 27, 2025

OMSCS – The Best Degree Program Ever?
Zvi Galil

Abstract:
In May 2013, Georgia Tech, together with its partners Udacity and AT&T, announced a new online master’s degree in computer science delivered through the platform popularized by massively open online courses (MOOCs). This new online MS in CS (OMSCS) costs less than $7,000 total, compared to a price tag of $40,000 for an MS CS at comparable public universities and upwards of $70,000 at private universities. The first-of-its-kind program was launched in January 2014 and has sparked a worldwide conversation about higher education in the 21st century. President Barack Obama has praised OMSCS by name twice, and hundreds of news stories have mentioned the program. It’s been described as a potential “game changer” and “ground zero of the revolution in higher education”. Harvard University researchers concluded that OMSCS is “the first rigorous evidence showing an online degree program can increase educational attainment” and predicted that OMSCS will single-handedly raise the number of annual MS CS graduates in the United States by at least 7 percent.

OMSCS started in 2014 with 5 courses and 380 students;  in fall 2025 semester, it had 46 courses and almost 17,000 students. OMSCS is apparently the biggest academic program in the world in any subject, not necessarily online. So far, almost 14,500 students have graduated from OMSCS, over 7,000 in the last 3 years. The number of applications to OMSCS keeps rising. In the 2024-25 academic year, there were 9,860 applications, 31% higher than the record in the year before. The program has also paved the way for more than 50 similar programs in over 30 universities. In November 2023, a Forbes article described OMSCS as the best degree program ever. There has been a big shortage of computing professionals in the US. Therefore, OMSCS is satisfying a great national need. Starting in 2017, Georgia Tech expanded its online offerings to undergraduate computer science students. The talk will describe the OMSCS program, how it came about, its first twelve years, and what Georgia Tech has learned from the OMSCS experience. It will also discuss the speaker’s vision of the future of higher education with a much larger role for online learning.

November 5, 2025

How to Close the 100,000-Year “Data Gap” in Robotics
Ken Goldberg

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.