The Harvard Systems Group at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) operates at the vital intersection of systems, theory, and hardware. We design and build the architectures, networks, and databases that form the backbone of modern computing.
From scaling global cloud infrastructure to optimizing the software-hardware interface, we don’t just study systems—we reinvent the layers that power the future.
Upcoming and Recent Seminars
Practical End-to-End Privacy and Data Use Policy Enforcement
·Malte Schwarzkopf (Brown University)
While modern data is governed by strict privacy policies, developers often lack the practical abstractions needed to ensure their code complies, leading to frequent manual errors and costly violations. Malte Schwarzkopf will introduce Sesame, a framework that utilizes policy containers and static analysis to automate end-to-end privacy enforcement with minimal developer effort and low performance overhead.
The Collapse of Constrained Physical AI
·Jason Jabbour (Harvard University)
As AI transitions from digital screens to autonomous physical systems like flight and construction, moving large-scale intelligence from the cloud to the edge presents significant technical and safety hurdles. Jason Jabbour will show these deployment constraints and share recent collaborative research that restores safety and task success within compressed Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.
Open Source Software (OSS) Inference Stack
·Robert Shaw (Red Hat)
Open source inference systems have become critically important as models get bigger and bigger and agentic applications create demanding workloads. In this talk, we will discuss the key trends in model architecture and hardware accelerator server design and how open-source inference systems like vLLM and llm-d optimize performance against these trends.
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