CMMRS will include lectures from 7 professors from the University of Maryland, Cornell University, and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. Lectures will cover a diverse range of topics. The full list of lectures and topics is yet to be finalized; for examples of lecturers and topics from previous years, take a look at the lectures from Previous Editions of CMMRS.
Mariya Toneva, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)
Bridging language in machines with language in the brain
The field of natural language processing (NLP) has undergone a revolution in the last few years, that has been brought about by the availability of large training datasets, improved computational power, and better optimization methods. In the first part of the lecture, we will introduce the recent advances in NLP and discuss some outstanding challenges. In the second part, we will discuss how we can quantify the similarity between NLP machines and the only processing system that we know truly understands language–the human brain. We will finish off with a deep dive into methods that improve the alignment between language in machines and language in the brain.
Soheil Feizi, University of Maryland
Lecture Topic TBA
Amol Deshpande, University of Maryland
Lecture Topic TBA
Robbert van Renesse, Cornell University
Topics in State Machine Replication
State Machine Replication (SMR) is a general approach to improving fault tolerance of systems. It is the backbone of many reliable cloud services and also the basis for consistent blockchains and smart contract execution. Starting from general principles, we will investigate approaches to implementing SMR under a variety of failure and timing models. We will look into how such implementations can reconfigure themselves, including the difficult problem of seamlessly adding new servers. Finally, we will consider scalability and efficiency and demonstrate a new design that can achieve almost unlimited throughput at low tail latency.