This is an advertisement for Prof. Gail Kaiser's Spring 2026 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, including software security and privacy, AI4SE and SE4AI. Students should have already completed at least one graduate level software systems course, preferably 4115 (compilers), 4118 (operating systems), 4156 (software engineering), 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, discussions and demos. Most 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 attendance is required for on-campus students, watching the recordings is not sufficient; written discussions can be substituted by CVN students who cannot attend class regularly. Some suggested student topics: Build on the C2Rust transpiler to translate legacy C code to safe Rust Benchmark for debugging AI-generated codebases Prompt LLMs with bug reproduction traces to generate bug fixes Protect applications from compromised or malicious libraries AI-generation of a usable operating system Automatic identification of likely zero-day vulnerabilities more coming... If you would like to take the course, please add yourself to the waitlist first, since I cannot approve your enrollment unless you are already on the waitlist. Then complete "homework zero", posted at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kaiser/6156-choosing-from-waitlist.Spring2026.txt, and email as text 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.