CS294: AI for Systems and Systems for AI (Spring 2019)

AI-Sys Course Website

The recent success of AI has been in large part due in part to advances in hardware and software systems. These systems have enabled training increasingly complex models on ever larger datasets. In the process, these systems have also simplified model development, enabling the rapid growth in the machine learning community. These new hardware and software systems include a new generation of GPUs and hardware accelerators (e.g., TPU and Nervana), open source frameworks such as Theano, TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet, Apache Spark, Clipper, Horovod, and Ray, and a myriad of systems deployed internally at companies just to name a few. At the same time, we are witnessing a flurry of ML/RL applications to improve hardware and system designs, job scheduling, program synthesis, and circuit layouts.

In this course, we will describe the latest trends in systems designs to better support the next generation of AI applications, and applications of AI to optimize the architecture and the performance of systems. The format of this course will be a mix of lectures, seminar-style discussions, and student presentations. Students will be responsible for paper readings, and completing a hands-on project. Readings will be selected from recent conference proceedings and journals. For projects, we will strongly encourage teams that contains both AI and systems students.