AI agents are moving from demos into real work, and in 2027 the hard questions are about trust. Will the biggest failures come from bad data, or from agents escaping their sandboxes? Who checks the AI-generated output piling up in every organization? Can we secure agents with fundamental solutions we already know how to build?
This showcase brings industry and academic speakers together with the faculty and students of the Data, Agents and Processes Lab (DAPLab) at Columbia to share how to prevent the bad things agents can do and enable the productivity they promise: talks, a panel, live demos, and student posters.
The event is invite-only, for leaders from industry and government. See our past workshops.
| Prevent bad things | Enable productivity | |
|---|---|---|
| Evaluation | Testing and checking agent software | Human oversight, productivity, and measuring real work |
| Security | Full-stack security, and red teaming for defense | Quality infrastructure: design, abstraction, sandboxing, and runtime checkpoint and rollback |
| Data | Data quality and robustness | Agents that answer questions over data lakes (LakeQA), and pretraining and post-training |
Junfeng Yang, Columbia Computer Science · testing agent software
Lydia Chilton, Columbia Computer Science · HCI and human oversight
Zhou Yu, Columbia Computer Science · agents and productivity
Neel Guha, Columbia Law School
Simha Sethumadhavan, Columbia Computer Science · full-stack security
Suman Jana, Columbia Computer Science · red teaming for defense
Kostis Kaffes, Columbia Computer Science · sandboxing, checkpoint and rollback
DAPLab students
Micah Goldblum, Columbia Electrical Engineering · data quality
Eugene Wu, Columbia Computer Science · LakeQA
John Hewitt, Columbia Computer Science · pretraining and post-training
As agents take on more autonomous work in 2027, which risks will matter most: unreliable data, or agents acting beyond their intended permissions? Industry and government leaders discuss where the next failures are likely to come from and what safeguards organizations should build now.
Laurens van der Maaten
Anthropic
Keynote, Oct 2025
Sasha Rush
Cursor
Keynote, Oct 2025
Jason Wei
OpenAI · Keynote, Mar 2025
Danielle Perszyk
Amazon AGI · Keynote, Mar 2025
Jonathan Frankle
Databricks
Wenyue Hua
Microsoft Frontier AI
Zach Lipton
CTO of Abridge & CMU faculty
Justin Debrabant
Databricks
Natalia Dorogi
McKinsey Quantum Black
Jamshed Cooper
UBS
Rotem Weiss
Tavily
Mehdi Jamei
Veris
Baishakhi Ray
Columbia CS
Tianyi Peng
Columbia CBS