CS551 - Spring’26

Welcome to CS 551: Streaming and Event-Driven Systems - Spring 2026.

Schedule | Project | Readings | Syllabus

Course information

Instructor: Vasiliki Kalavri
Teaching Fellow: Lei Huang
Lectures: Thu 12:30pm-3:15pm, CDS 950
Discussions: Wed 1:25pm - 2:15pm, CAS 116

Courseware

Office hours

Prof. Kalavri: TBA (CDS 713, 7th floor).
Teaching Fellow: Tuesday 3-4:30pm, Friday 1-2:30pm (CDS 722, 7th floor)

Overview

Modern data-driven applications increasingly require continuous, low-latency processing of large-scale, rapid data events such as clicks, search queries, online interactions, financial transactions, traffic records, and sensor measurements. Distributed stream processing has become highly relevant to industry and academia due to its capabilities to both improve established data processing tasks and to facilitate novel applications with real-time requirements. In this course, you will learn how to design, implement, and evaluate scalable and reliable stream processing and event-driven applications.

Specifically, we will cover the following topics:

Publish/Subscribe systems
Architecture of distributed stream processing systems
Dataflow programming
Fault-tolerance and processing guarantees
Streaming state management
Windowing semantics and optimizations
Complex event processing
Microservice architectures
Serverless functions and their relationship to stream processing

Prerequisites

CAS CS 351 or equivalent and CAS CS 460 or consent of instructor.

To be successful in this course, students will need to have strong programming skills and a solid understanding of Distributed Systems / Go programming (CS 351 / CS 651). Familiarity with Database Systems (CS 460) is highly recommended.

Grading scheme

Your final grade will be determined by (1) 3 programming assignment, (2) 3 in-class quizzes, (3) your semester project deliverables, and (4) in-class participation. There is no final examination at the end of the course. See the Syllabus for the detailed grading scheme.