Overview

The Systems Week is a five-day seminar on the principles and practice of software systems. Its goal is to prepare a cohort of 20–25 participants for cutting-edge research in the area of systems. Yearly topics combine recurring systems themes, combined with each year's special theme driven by broader trends in the field. Each topic is co-taught by a faculty pair with combined expertise on the subject, offering a chance to study a problem from multiple complementary perspectives. A key goal of the seminar is to foster collaborations between faculty and students that far exceed the seminar's timeline, ideally into the rest of the summer and beyond.

A typical Systems Week will include five mini-courses, delivered in daily lectures from multiple faculty members. Example topics include automated parallelization and distribution, retrofitting privacy guarantees, automated reasoning for systems, and scalable dataflow and streaming systems. The target audience includes advanced undergraduate or early PhD students with a serious (and broad) background in systems, but not necessarily on any of the seminar's theme topics. An anticipated set of prerequisites and prior knowledge will be made available several weeks prior to the seminar.

The Week's first edition will include a smaller cohort and possibly a small set of courses.

Organization & Schedule

The sessions are non-overlapping, so all participants will have the opportunity to attend all lectures. Lectures and hacking sessions take place in the Watson Center for Information Technology (CIT) (room 241) .

Below are the confirmed minicourses for this year’s program:

• Supply-chain Security (Security)
  A targeted introduction from Vasileios Kemerlis on supply-chain security, binary analysis, disassembly, and dependency analysis. How can we study and potentially restrict the behavior of modern cross-stack components automatically?
• From the Informal to the Formal-and Back Again! (Reasoning)
  A minicourse from Tim Nelson and Rob Lewis. We've all written unit tests for the systems we create. More formal, top-down kinds of specification allow much stronger forms of reasoning about our systems—but how can we bridge the gap to get there?
• Symbolic Execution for the Shell (Symbolic)
  A minicourse from Lukas Lazarek. Could the shell's users enjoy the benefits of semantics-driven ahead-of-time analysis before ther execution of these programs-as offered by most other production languages?
• Introduction to High-Speed Networks (FastNets)
  A hands-on introduction to low-latency networking systems from Akshay Narayan and Deepti Raghavan, covering topics such as kernel bypass, eBPF, and asynchronous I/O with io_uring.
• The Many Facets of Fuzz Testing (Fuzzing)
  A minicourse by Di Jin introducing the principles and techniques behind automated and principled fuzz testing of large-scale software systems.

We will also feature a special guest session by Amy Ousterhout, and hold interactive discussions on graduate school applications.

Application

Among other information, the application process includes:

1. A letter of motivation, where applicants outline their technical background, their anticipated gains from participating in the Systems Week, and optionally what they hope to contribute.
2. A letter of recommendation that comments on the candidate's design, building, or characterization abilities in software systems, broadly construed.

To apply, please fill out the following form. The deadline for applying is May 15th. If you have any questions, feel free to contact the organizing committee by emailing ioanna_gemou@brown.edu.

An anticipated set of prerequisites and prior knowledge will be made available several weeks prior to the seminar.