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Research Showcase

Showcase Awards

Madrona Prize

The Paul G. Allen School and Madrona Venture Group celebrate student innovation presented at the Allen School’s annual Industry Affiliates Research Showcase.

In recent years, our friends at Madrona Venture Group have offered a prize in connection with the Affiliates poster/demo session to recognize projects that combined exciting, innovative research with the strongest commercial potential.


Here is a complete list of all winners, in reverse chronological order.

2024 Winners

Winner: Meeting Bridges and PaperPing / Ruotong Wang, Xinyi Zhou, Lin Qiu Amy X. Zhang

Runner up: Knowledge Boosting During Low-Latency Inference / Vidya Srinivas, Malek Itani, Shyam Gollakota

Runner up: Interpreting Nanopore Signals to Enable Single-Molecule Protein Sequencing / Daphne Kontogiorgos-Heintz, Jeff Nivala.


2023 Winners

Winner: ‘QLoRA: Efficient Fine Tuning of Quantized LLMs’ / Tim Dettmers, Artidoro Pagnoni, Ari Holtzman, Luke Zettlemoyer

Runner up: Punica: Multi Tenant LoRA Fine-tuned LLM Serving / Lequn Chen, Zihao Ye, Yongji Wu (Duke), Danyang Zhuo (Duke), Luis Ceze, Arvind Krishnamurthy

Runner up: Wireless Earbuds for Low-Cost Hearing Screening / Justin Chan, Antonio Glenn, Malek Itani, Lisa R. Mancl (Dept. Speech & Hearing Sciences), Emily Gallagher (Seattle Children’s Hospital), Randall Bly (Seattle Children’s Hospital), Shwetak Patel, Shyamnath Gollakota


2022 Winners
Jeff Dean

Winner: ‘Video Organization and Exploration’ and ‘Interactive Video Analytics for Compositional Queries’ / Maureen Daum, Enhao Zhang, Dong He, Ranjay Krishna, Brandon Haynes, Magda Balazinska

Runner up: ClearBuds: Wireless Binaural Earbuds for Machine Learning Based Speech Enhancement / Ishan Chatterjee, Maruchi Kim, Vivek Jayaram, Shyam Gollakota, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Shwetak Patel, Steven M. Seitz

Runner up: Data Analysis Systems for Statistical Non-Experts / Eunice Jun, Jeffrey Heer, Rene Just

Runner up: Levity: Contactless Robotics and Automation for Synthetic Biology / Jared Nakahara and Professor Joshua R. Smith

2019 Winners
Jeff Dean

Winner: CoAI: Cost-Aware Artificial Intelligence for Health Care / Gabriel Erion, Joseph Janizek, Allen School professor Su-In Lee, Dr. Carly Hudelson, Dr. Nathan White

Runner up: AuraRing: Precise Electromagnetic Finger Tracking via Smart Ring / Farshid Salemi Parizi Alvin Cao; Eric Whitmire (Ph.D., ‘19); Ishan Chatterjee; Tianke Li; and Allen School professor Shwetak Patel

Runner up: Molecular Tagging with Nanopore-orthogonal DNA Strands / Katie Doroschak, Melissa Queen, Karen Zhang, Aishwarya Mandyam (B.S., ‘19); research scientist Jeff Nivala; Allen School affiliate professor Karin Strauss, Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research; and Allen School professor Luis Ceze

Runner up: HomeSound: Exploring Sound Awareness in the Home for People Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing / Dhruv Jain, Kelly Mack, Steven Goodman; professor Leah Findlater of the Department of Human-Centered Design & Engineering; and Allen School professor Jon FroehlichRunner up: Levity: Contactless Robotics and Automation for Synthetic Biology / Jared Nakahara and Professor Joshua R. Smith

2018 Winners
Jeff Dean

Winner: EMBARKER: A hierarchical Bayesian approach empowering big data with prior knowledge for expression marker discovery and its application to Alzheimer’s disease / Safiye Celik, Josh C. Russell, Cezar R. Pestana, Ting-I Lee, Shubhabrata Mukherjee, Paul K. Crane, C. Dirk Keene, Jennifer F. Bobb, Matt Kaeberlein, and Allen School professor Su-In Lee

Runner up: Puddle: A System for High-Level Microfluidic Programming / Max Willsey, Ashley Stephenson, Chris Takahashi, Pranav Vaid, Bichlien Nguyen, Michal Piszczek, Christine Betts, Sharon Newman, Sarang Joshi , Allen School professor Luis Ceze and Allen School affiliate professor Karin Strauss

Runner up: Slim: OS Kernel Support for a Low-Overhead Container Overlay Network / Danyang Zhuo, Kaiyuan Zhang, Yibo Zhu, Hongqiang Harry Liu, Matthew Rockett, and Allen School professors Arvind Krishnamurthy and Tom Anderson

Runner up: Implantable Wireless Brain-Computer Interface / Jared Nakahara, Vaishnavi Ranganathan, Soshi Samejima, Nicholas Tolley, and Chet Moritz, and Allen School professor Joshua R. Smith

2017 Winners
Jeff Dean

Winner: LabintheWild: Large-scale online experimentation with diverse uncompensated samples / Allen School postdoc Nigini Abilio Oliveira; Allen School Ph.D. student Eunice Jun; and Allen School professor Katharina Reinecke

Winner:
Augury: predicting visual appeal of website design / visiting scientist Manuel Nordhoff and Allen School professor Katharina Reinecke

Runner up: A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions / Allen School Ph.D. student Scott Lundberg and Allen School professor Su-In Lee

Runner up: Real-Time VR Video Processing with the Hardware-Friendly Bilateral / Allen School Ph.D. student Amrita Mazumdar; Allen School post doc Armin Alaghi; and Allen School professors Luis Ceze and Mark Oskin

Runner up: TVM: End-to-End IR Stack for Deep Learning Systems / Allen School Ph.D. students Tianqi Chen, Thierry Moreau, Haichen Shen; Fudan University undergraduate and AWS intern Ziheng Jiang; Allen School professors Luis Ceze, Carlos Guestrin, and Arvind Krishnamurthy

2016 Winners
Jeff Dean

Winner: The Next Big Leap in Backscatter Communication / Mehrdad Hessar (EE), Bryce Kellogg (EE), Vamsi Talla, Shyam Gollakota, Joshua R. Smith

Runner-Up: Just Say NO to Paxos Overhead: Replacing Consensus with Network Ordering / Jialin Li, Ellis Michael, Naveen Kr. Sharma, Adriana Szekeres, Dan R. K. Ports

Runner-Up: PipeGen: Data Pipe Generator for Hybrid Analytics / Brandon Haynes, Alvin Cheung, Magda Balazinska

Runner-Up: Programming by Examples for Industrial Data Wrangling / Alex Polozov; Sumit Gulwani and the PROSE team at Microsoft

2015 Winners

Winner: What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks (Total Moving Face Reconstruction) / Supasorn Suwajanakorn, Steve Seitz, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman

Runner-Up: ApneaApp – Diagnosing Sleep Apnea / Rajalakshmi Nandakumar

Runner-Up: Building Consistent Transactions with Inconsistent Replication (TAPIR) / Irene Zhang, Naveen Kr. Sharma, Adriana Szekeres, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Dan R. K. Ports

Runner-Up: HyperCam – Hyperspectral Imaging and Their Applications / Mayank Goel, Eric Whitmire, Alex Mariakakis, Scott Saponas, Neel Joshi, Shwetak Patel

2014 Winners

Winner: Arrakis: The Operating System is the Control Plane / Simon Peter, Jialin Li, Irene Zhang, Dan R.K. Ports, Doug Woos, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson, Timothy Roscoe

Runner-Up: WiBreathe: Estimating Respiration Rate Using Wireless Signals in Natural Settings in the Home / Ruth V. Ravichandran, Elliot N. Saba, Ke-Yu Chen, Mayank Goel, Sidhant Gupta, Shwetak N. Patel

Runner-Up: Total Moving Face Reconstruction / Supasorn Suwajanakorn, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Steven M. Seitz.

2013 Winners
Jeff Dean

Winner: Ambient Back Scatter: Battery Free Communication / Aaron Parks, Vincent Liu, Vamsi Talla

Runner-Up: Personalized SLAs in the Cloud / Jennifer Ortiz, Victor Texeira de Almeida

Runner-Up: iHome 3D: Capturing Indoor Scenes with Smartphone / Aditya Sankar

Runner-Up: WiSee: Whole Home Gesture Recognition Using WiFi / Ruth Ravichandran, Sidhant Gupta, Qifan Pu

Video of presentation here

2012 Winners

Winner: SpiroSmart: Using a Microphone to Measure Lung Function on a Mobile Phone / Eric C. Larson, Mayank Goel

Runner-Up: FreeDOM: a New Baseline for the Web / Raymond Cheng, Will Scott

Runner-Up: Wireless Power for Left Ventricular Assist Device / Ben Waters, Scott Wisdom, Brody Mahoney, Chen Shi

2011 Winners

Winner: Humantenna: Sensing Whole-Body Gestures Using the Human Body as an Antenna / Gabe Cohn

Runner-Up: ShareMeNot: Protecting users from third-party social media buttons / Franzi Roesner

Runner-Up: Playing Games with Robots: Autonomous Small-Scale Manipulation / Cynthia Matuszek

2010 Winners

Winner: Prefab: Modifying Any Graphical User Interface / Morgan Dixon & Daniel Leventhal

Runner-Up: SNUPI: Sensor Nodes Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure / Gabe Cohn

Runner-Up: Comet: An active distributed key-value store / Amit Levy & Roxana Geambasu

Runner-Up: Scalable Distributed Network Management / Colin Dixon & Dane Brandon

2009 Winners

Winner: HydroSense / Jon Froehlich, Sidhant Gupta, Eric Larson, Gabe Cohen & Tim Campbell

Runner-Up: Reverse Traceroute / Ethan Katz-Bassett

Runner-Up: Deterministic Multiprocessing / Joseph Devietti & Brandon Lucia

Runner-Up: Vanish: Increasing Privacy with Self-Destructing Data / Roxana Geambasu & Amit Levy

2008 Winners

Winner: One Swarm / Michael Piatek & Tomas Isdal

Runner-Up: Developing a Wayfinding Application for Individuals with Cognitive Impairments / Alan Lui & Harlan Hile

Runner-Up: Fold-It / Seth Cooper

Runner-Up: Semi-private Internet via Shared Knowledge Questions / Michael Toomin

2007 Winners

Winner: Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene Graduate student participants / Pravin Bhat & Noah Snavely

Runner-Up: A Case for OneSwarm / Michael Piatek & Tomas Isdal

Runner-Up: On Best-Response Bidding in Ad Auctions Graduate Student Participant / Yionnis Giotis

Runner-Up: The Organization and Sharing of Web-Service Objects with Menagerie / Roxana Geambasu, Cherie Chung, & Alex Moshchuk

2006 Winners

Winner: Summarizing Personal Web Browsing Sessions / Mira Dontcheva

Runner-Up: Interactive Cutaway Illustrations of Complex Models / Wil Li

Runner-Up: SpyProxy: On-the-fly Protection from Malicious Web Content / Alex Moshchuk & Tanya Bragin