This is an advertisement for Prof. Gail Kaiser's Spring 2025 COMS E6156 Topics in Software Engineering, the only regularly offered course at Columbia CS where students have the opportunity to explore in depth a specific topic of their own choosing. 

6156 is a seminar oriented towards graduate students and advanced undergraduates who aspire to become, or already are, researchers or industry technology leaders.  

Students should be highly self-motivated to pursue their own forward-looking topic within software engineering, broadly construed. 6156 is not "more" 4156, and not "more advanced" 4156. 4156 is about doing software engineering, and 6156 is about improving software engineering. Students should have already completed at least one graduate level software systems course, preferably 4115 (compilers), 4118 (operating systems), 4156 (software engineering) or 4181 (security) or their equivalent.

Students read, present and discuss research papers; write a midterm literature review paper; and conduct and write up a final research project.  The paper must be individually written but the project can be joint with any reasonably-sized team.  Each student chooses their own topic(s) with instructor approval.  A student's midterm paper topic typically leads into the student's final project topic, but it's ok to change topics.

There are few instructor lectures, after the first week most class sessions consist of student presentations, demos and discussions.  All classes are held on zoom, not in a physical classroom, but this course still counts as "in-person" for students who are required to take classes in-person.  Class participation is required, watching the recordings is not sufficient, but can include edstem discussions outside of class sessions. CVN students are welcome (there is a designated CVN section).  

Some recent student topics:

Fault Localization Techniques for Deep Neural Networks
GAN-based Inpainting Algorithms
MLIR: Design and Impact
MLOps Challenges and Solutions
Mixed Reality Socializing
Sparse Matrix Support in LLVM
Bias in AI Image Generation
Transformers for Masked Facial Recognition
Gaze-Controlled VR Game

Some suggested student topics:

LLM-based translation from C to idiomatic safe Rust  
Protecting containerized applications from compromised libraries 
Generating unit tests from buggy execution traces to test candidate fixes 

If you would like to take the course, please add yourself to the waitlist and then complete "homework zero", posted at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kaiser/6156-choosing-from-waitlist.Spring2025.txt.  Email your "homework zero" to kaiser+6156@cs.columbia.edu.  Please do not omit the +6156 or I might not see your email.

You do not need to submit again if you have already been approved to enroll in the course.