Mehrdad Hessar accepts the 2016 Madrona Prize
Each year as part of our Industry Affiliates meeting, UW CSE welcomes alumni and friends to a celebration of student research and its potential for impact. Our annual open house, which was held last night, features good food, great company, and terrific posters and demos that showcase an impressive variety of projects from the CSE labs.
The event also features the Madrona Prize, an award from our friends at Madrona Venture Group that recognizes student research with commercialization potential, and the People’s Choice Award, which is, as the name suggests, a chance for our guests to select their favorite projects.
Matt McIlwain of Madrona awarded the 11th annual Madrona Prize to “The Next Big Leap in Backscatter Communication,” presented by CSE postdoc Vamsi Talla. This project builds on previous backscatter research in the Networks & Mobile Systems Lab that enables battery-free devices to communicate by pulling power out of the air. The team, which also includes EE Ph.D. students Mehrdad Hessar and Bryce Kellogg, CSE professor Shyam Gollakota, and CSE and EE professor Josh Smith, demonstrates with its latest project that backscatter can work over distances of up to 1 kilometer, with potential applications in agriculture, home sensing, and smart medical devices.
Below is a complete run-down of the award winners and runners up who were recognized during last evening’s festivities.
2016 Madrona Prize
Winner: The Next Big Leap in Backscatter Communication (Electrical Engineering Ph.D. students Mehrdad Hessar and Bryce Kellogg; CSE postdoc Vamsi Talla; CSE professor Shyam Gollakota; CSE and EE professor Josh Smith)
Runner up: PipeGen: Data Pipe Generator for Hybrid Analytics (CSE Ph.D. student Brandon Haynes; CSE professors Alvin Cheung and Magda Balazinska)
Runner up: Just Say NO to Paxos Overhead: Replacing Consensus with Network Ordering (CSE Ph.D. students Jialin Li, Ellis Michael, Naveen Kr. Sharma, and Adriana Szekeres; CSE professor Dan R. K. Ports)
Runner up: Programming by Examples for Industrial Data Wrangling (CSE Ph.D. student Alex Polozov; Sumit Gulwani and the PROSE team at Microsoft)
Yasaman S. Sefidgar explains her research at the open house
2016 People’s Choice Award
Winner: Situated Tangible Robot Programming (CSE researcher Yasaman S. Sefidgar; EE undergraduate Prerna Agarwal; CSE professor Maya Cakmak)
Runner up: When the White Coats Leave: Unsupervised Decoding of Long-term, Naturalistic Human Neural Recordings with Automated Video and Audio Annotations (CSE Ph.D. student Nancy Xin Ru Wang; Jeff Ojemann of Seattle Children’s Hospital; UW CSE professors Ali Farhadi and Rajesh Rao; UW biology professor Bing Brunton)
Runner up: TummyTrials: Using Self-Experimentation to Detect Individualized Food Triggers (CSE Ph.D. students Ravi Karkar, Jessica Schroeder, and Daniel Epstein; CSE postdoc Laura Pina; CSE staff member Jeffrey Scofield; CSE professor James Fogarty; HCDE professors Julie Kientz and Sean Munson; Duke University professor Roger Vilardarga; Jasmine Zia of UW Medicine)
Read Madrona’s press release here, and check out the complete list of posters and demos here. Congratulations to all of our winners, and huge thanks to our friends at Madrona and to all of our alumni and friends who came out to support student research!