Columbia Entrepreneurship

Columbia Engineering Lecture Series in AI: "From Microservices to Analytics and GenAI, Data Streaming Unlocks Everything"
2026-08-11 08:00 - 17:00 UTC
RSVP
Data streaming is rapidly emerging as a mainstream platform for integrating data in real time, with Apache Kafka becoming the de facto standard for this architecture. Many event-driven applications have been built on Kafka to enable businesses to respond to real-time events as they unfold. In this talk, I will explain how data streaming not only powers operational applications but also enhances analytics and generative AI by shifting processing closer to the source. I’ll also share our vision for what constitutes a complete and modern data streaming platform.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jun Rao is a co-founder of Confluent, a company that provides a data streaming platform based on Apache Kafka. Before Confluent, he was a senior staff engineer at LinkedIn where he led the development of Kafka. Before LinkedIn, Jun Rao was a researcher at IBM’s Almaden research center, where he conducted research on database and distributed systems. Jun Rao is a committer of Apache Kafka and Apache Cassandra. Jun Rao obtained his PhD in computer science from Columbia University in 2000.
