Welcome to CS 551: Streaming and Event-Driven Systems - Spring 2025.

Lectures | Discussions | Readings | Syllabus

Course information

• Instructor: Vasiliki Kalavri
• Teaching Fellow: Muhammad Faisal
• Lectures: Tue/Thu 3:30pm-4:45pm, CAS 201
• Discussions: Wed 12:20pm - 1:20pm, CAS B36

Courseware

• Piazza
• Github classroom
• Gradescope

Office hours

• Prof. Kalavri: Tue 5-7pm (CCDS 713, 7th floor).
• Teaching Fellow: Thu 1pm - 3pm (Open space near CCDS 713, 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 112 and CAS CS 210; CAS CS 351 and CAS CS 460 or consent of instructor.

To be successful in this course, students will need to have strong programming skills, a solid understanding of Computer Systems fundamentals (CS 210) and some prior experience with object-oriented programming / Java (CS 211). Familiarity with Distributed Systems (CS 351 / CS 651) and Database Systems (CS 460) is highly recommended.

Grading scheme

Your final grade will be determined by (1) your participation & effort, (2) paper and discussion quizzes, and (3) your semester project deliverables. There is no final examination at the end of the course. See the Syllabus for the detailed grading scheme.