Award Papers

Allen School researchers advance the state of the art in computing through groundbreaking work that has an enduring impact on the field.

The following is a partial list of award-winning, peer-reviewed papers by Allen School faculty and students spanning artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer interaction, social computing, security and privacy, mobile computing and more.

2025

FOCS Machtey (Best Student Paper Award)

Obfuscation of Unitary Quantum Programs

2026

CHI (Best Paper Award)

GeoVisA11y: An AI-based Geovisualization Question-Answering System for Screen-Reader Users

2026

CHI (Best Paper Award)

Cocoa: Co-Planning and Co-Execution with AI Agents

2026

CACM (Research Highlight)

egg: Fast and Extensible Equality Saturation

2026

STOC (Best Paper Award)

Separating QMA from QCMA with a Classical Oracle

2026

EATCS/SIGACT Gödel Prize (Test of Time Award)

Robust Estimators in High Dimensions without the Computational Intractability

2026

SIGCOMM (Best Paper Award)

Presto: A Match-Action TCP Stack for the Terabit Era

2026

SOUPS Impact Award

End User Security & Privacy Concerns with Smart Homes

2026

STOC (Best Paper)

Separating QMA from QCMA with a Classical Oracle

2026

AISTATS (Test of Time Award)

Non-stochastic Best Arm Identification and Hyperparameter Optimization

2025

ACM (Doctoral Dissertation Award)

Human-AI Collaboration to Support Mental Health and Well-Being

2025

AAAI/ACM SIGAI (Dissertation Award Winner)

Beyond Scaling: Frontiers of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

2025

(Computational Linguistics Doctoral Dissertation Award Winner)

Rethinking Data Use in Large Language Models

2025

FOCS (Best Student Paper Award)

Obfuscation of Unitary Quantum Programs

2025

NeurIPS (Best Paper Award)

Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond)

2025

EMNLP (Best Paper Award)

Infini-gram mini: Exact n-gram Search at the Internet Scale with FM-Index

2025

InfoVis (10-Year Test of Time Award)

Voyager: Exploratory Analysis via Faceted Browsing of Visualization Recommendations

2025

SIGACCESS ASSETS (Paper Impact Award)

Freedom to roam: a study of mobile device adoption and accessibility for people with visual and motor disabilities

2025

USENIX (Test of Time Award)

Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces

2025

TACL (Test of Time Award)

Weakly Supervised Learning of Semantic Parsers for Mapping Instructions to Actions

2025

ACL (Outstanding Paper Award)

Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens

2025

ICWSM (Best Paper Award)

Reddit Rules and Rulers: Quantifying the Link Between Rules and Perceptions of Governance Across Thousands of Communities

2025

SIGMOD (Best Paper Award)

LpBound: Pessimistic Cardinality Estimation using Lp-Norms of Degree Sequences

2025

ICRA (Best Student Paper Award)

TinySense: A Lighter Weight and More Power-efficient Avionics System for Flying Insect-scale Robots

2025

MLSys (Best Paper Award)

FlashInfer: Efficient and Customizable Attention Engine for LLM Inference Serving

2025

CHI (Best Paper Award)

Deploying and Examining Beacon for At-Home Patient Self-Monitoring with Critical Flicker Frequency

2025

ICTD (Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards)

Partition Constraints for Conjunctive Queries: Bounds and Worst-Case Optimal Joins

2025

CIDR (Test of Time Award)

The Design of the Borealis Stream Processing Engine

2024

IMC (Best Paper)

Analyzing the (In)Accessibility of Online Advertisements

2024

IMWUT (Distinguished Paper Award)

FeverPhone: Accessible Core-Body Temperature Sensing for Fever Monitoring Using Commodity Smartphones

2024

ISSTA (Impact Paper Award)

Defects4J: a database of existing faults to enable controlled testing studies for Java programs

2024

SAT (Test of Time Award)

Combining Component Caching and Clause Learning for Effective Model Counting

2024

FSE (Most Influential Paper Award)

Are mutants a valid substitute for real faults in software testing?

2024

STOC (30-Year Test of Time Award)

Balanced Allocations

2024

CHI (Best Paper Award)

MigraineTracker: Examining Patient Experiences with Goal-Directed Self-Tracking for a Chronic Health Condition

2024

CHI (Best Paper Award)

Mitigating Barriers to Public Social Interaction with Meronymous Communication

2024

CHI (Best Paper Award)

rTisane: Externalizing conceptual models for data analysis prompts reconsideration of domain assumptions and facilitates statistical modeling

2024

EATCS (Distinguished Dissertation Award)

Finding Structure in Entropy: Improved Approximation Algorithms for TSP and other Graph Problems

2023

Journal of the Learning Sciences (Outstanding Paper Award)

Reconfiguring science education through caring human inquiry and design with pets

2023

NSDI (Test of Time)

Detecting and Defending Against Third-Party Tracking on the Web

2023

HRI (Best Design Paper)

Design Principles for Robot-Assisted Feeding in Social Contexts

2023

SIGACT/EATCS (Gödel Prize)

The Matching Polytope has Exponential Extension Complexity

2023

CHI (Best Paper)

CiteSee: Augmenting Citations in Scientific Papers with Persistent and Personalized Historical Context

2023

PODS (Test of Time)

Communication Steps for Parallel Query Processing

2023

COGSCI (Best Paper, Perception and Action)

Dynamic Predictive Coding Explains Both Prediction and Motion Perception

2023

ACL (Outstanding Paper)

Minding Language Models’ (Lack of) Theory of Mind: A Plug-and-Play Multi-Character Belief Tracker

2023

ACL (Outstanding Paper)

Cognitive Reframing of Negative Thoughts through Human-Language Model Interaction

2023

ACL (Best Paper)

From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Models

2023

ACL (Best Paper)

Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep? Humor ‘Understanding’ Benchmarks from The New Yorker Caption Contest

2023

IMC (Best Paper)

Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo Smart Speaker Ecosystem

2023

ACM SIGCHI (Outstanding Dissertation Award )

Sound Sensing and Feedback Techniques for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People

2023

EATCS (Distinguished Dissertation Award)

Spectral Independence A New Tool to Analyze Markov Chains

2022

PLDI (Best Paper)

Synthesizing Analytical SQL Queries from Computation Demonstration

2022

ACL (Test of Time)

Open Language Learning for Information Extraction

2022

PODS (Best Paper)

Convergence of Datalog over (Pre-) Semirings

2022

IEEE VIS (Test of Time)

Enterprise Data Analysis and Visualization: An Interview Study

2022

ISS (10-Year Impact)

The Sound of Touch: On-body Touch and Gesture Sensing Based on Transdermal Ultrasound Propagation

2022

NeurIPS (Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Paper)

LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models

2022

NeurIPS (Outstanding Paper)

ProcTHOR: Large-Scale Embodied AI Using Procedural Generation

2021

ICDT (Test of Time)

Knowledge Compilation Meets Database Theory: Compiling Queries to Decision Diagrams

2021

WWW (Best Paper)

Towards Facilitating Empathic Conversations in Online Mental Health Support: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

2021

CHI (Best Paper)

“That courage to encourage”: Participation and Aspirations in Chat-based Peer Support for Youth Living with HIV

2021

CHI (Best Paper)

Falx: Synthesis-Powered Visualization Authoring

2021

ICRA (Best Paper, Human-Robot Interaction)

Reactive Human-to-Robot Handovers of Arbitrary Objects

2021

IEEE InfoVis (Test of Time)

D3: Data-Driven Documents

2021

ASSETS (Impact Award)

Disability studies as a source of critical inquiry for the field of assistive technology

2021

STOC (Best Paper)

Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions

2021

STOC (Best Paper)

A (Slightly) Improved Approximation Algorithm for Metric TSP

2021

PETS (Best Student Paper)

Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH): A Practical Privacy Enhancement to DNS

2021

SOSP (Best Paper)

Using Lightweight Formal Methods to Validate a Key-Value Storage Node in Amazon S3

2021

NeurIPS (Outstanding Paper)

MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers

2021

ACM SIGMOBILE (Doctoral Dissertation Award)

Computational Wireless Sensing at Scale

2020

AAAI (Outstanding Paper)

WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale

2020

IEEE S&P (Test of Time)

Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile

2020

ICRA (Milestone Award)

Research & Innovation

Award Papers

Spectral Independence A New Tool to Analyze Markov Chains