Senior Thesis Award
The Allen School presents the Best Senior Thesis Award annually. The purpose of the award is to recognize the honors student(s) who writes the most outstanding senior thesis in a given year.
Process
- Announcement of the Award. The announcement of the award will take place at the departmental graduation ceremony on graduation day.
- Nomination Letter. The faculty member sponsoring the research project provides a nomination letter describing the honors student’s research contribution. The nomination letter should address the criteria listed below.
- Submission Deadline.The nomination letter and thesis must be submitted to the undergraduate advisers by 10am on Tuesday, May 28th for spring 2024. Submissions after the deadline will not be considered.
- Selection Committee. The selection of the best senior thesis will be done by a committee of two faculty members and one undergraduate adviser according to the criteria below.
Criteria
The selection of the best senior thesis is based on the originality, impact, and written quality of the work. Work that has been submitted to and/or accepted at workshops, conferences, or journals will be considered more favorably. Work that is primarily attributed to the student’s own initiative will be considered more favorably. Finally, the quality of the written document in terms of its organization, polish, and use of language will be considered.
Past Senior Thesis Award Winners
2023 Best Senior Thesis Award
- Winner: The Art of Algorithm and Knowledge in the Era of Extreme-Scale Neural Models
Ximing Lu, supervised by Yejin Choi - Runner-up: Scaling Embodied Artificial Intelligence: Massive 3D Simulations to Real-World Distributional Robustness
Matt Deitkie, supervised by Ali Farhadi
Winner, 2022 Best Senior Thesis Award
Flipping the Script: Co-Designing Systems to Support Blind and Low Vision Audio Description Scriptwriters
Lucy Jiang, supervised by Richard Ladner
Winners, 2021 Best Senior Thesis Award
- Assessing the Relationship Between Routine and Schizophrenia Symptoms with Passively Sensed Measures of Behavioral Stability
Joy He-Yueya, supervised by Tim Althoff - Design Principles for Mobile and Wearable Health Technologies
Parker Ruth, supervised by Shwetak Patel
Winner, 2020 Best Senior Thesis Award
Understanding and Designing for Security and Privacy in Multi-User AR Interactions
Kimberly Ruth, supervised by Franziska Roesner & Yoshi Kohno
Winner, 2019 Best Senior Thesis Award
Implicit Linguistic Knowledge of Neural Natural Language Processing Models
Nelson Liu, supervised by Noah Smith
Winner, 2018 Best Senior Thesis Award
A Crash-Safe Key-Value Store Using Chained Copy-on-Write B-trees
Bruno Castro-Karney, supervised by Xi Wang
Winner, 2017 Best Senior Thesis Award
The Methods of Interlacing Polynomials
Kuikui Liu, supervised by Shayan Oveis Gharan
Winner, 2017 Best Senior Thesis Award
Respeak: A Voice-based, Crowd-powered, and Accessible Speech Transcription System
Pooja Sethi, supervised by Richard Anderson
Winner, 2016 Best Senior Thesis Award
Navigating a 2D Virtual World Using Direct Brain Stimulation
Darby Losey, supervised by Rajesh Rao
Winner, 2015 Best Senior Thesis Award
Probability Type Inference for Flexible Approximate Programming
Brett Boston, supervised by Dan Grossman
Winner, 2014 Best Senior Thesis Award
DCDN: Distributed Content Delivery for the Modern Web
Nick Martindell, supervised by Tom Anderson & Arvind Krishnamurthy
Winner, 2013 Best Senior Thesis Award
An API For Touch-Free Interfaces For Andriod Devices
Leeran Raphaely, supervised by Gaetano Borriello
Winner, 2012 Best Senior Thesis Award
The Elan Programming Language for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays
Elliott Brossard, supervised by Carl Ebeling
Winner, 2011 Best Senior Thesis Award
LIFEGUARD: Locating Internet Failure Events and Generating Usable Alternate Routes Dynamically
Robert Colin Scott, supervised by Tom Anderson
Winner, 2010 Best Senior Thesis Award
Applications of the IP Timestamp Option to Internet Measurement
Justine Sherry, supervised by Tom Anderson
Winner, 2009 Best Senior Thesis Award
Real-Time Classification of Everyday Fitness Activities on Windows Mobile
Alireza Bagheri Garakani, supervised by James Fogarty
Winner, 2008 Best Senior Thesis Award
Maintaining Intelligibility of ASL Video in the Presence of Data Loss
Sam Whittle, supervised by Richard Ladner
Winner, 2007 Best Senior Thesis Award
Context-Based Arithmetic Coding for the DCT: Achieving high compression rates with block transforms and simple context modeling
Kyle Littlefield, supervised by Richard Ladner
Winner, 2006 Best Senior Thesis Award
Feature-Based Classification of the Mouse Eye Images
Jenny Yuen, supervised by Linda Shapiro
Winner, 2005 Best Senior Thesis Award
Text Segmentation and Grouping for Tactile Graphics
Matthew Renzelmann, supervised by Richard Ladner
All CSE honors theses, including the past winners of the Best Senior Thesis Award, are published online as part of the Undergraduate Thesis Archive below.
Senior Thesis Archive
A list of all Allen School student theses, archived online since 2005.
2021
Winners, 2021 Best Senior Thesis Award
Design Principles for Mobile and Wearable Health Technologies
Parker S. Ruth, supervised by Dr. Shwetak Patel
and
Assessing The Relationship Between Routine and Schizophrenia Symptoms with Passi
Joy He, supervised by Tim Althoff
2020
Winner, 2020 Best Senior Thesis Award
Understanding and Designing for Security and Privacy in Multi-User AR Interactions
Kimberly Ruth, supervised by Franziska Roesner and Tadayoshi Kohno
2019
Winner, 2019 Best Senior Thesis Award
Implicit Linguistic Knowledge of Neural Natural Language Processing Models
Nelson Liu, supervised by Noah Smith
2018
Winner, 2018 Best Senior Thesis Award
A Crash-Safe Key-Value Store Using Chained Copy-on-Write B-trees
Bruno Castro-Karney, supervised by Xi Wang
BrainNet: A Multi-Person Brain-to-Brain Interface for Direct Collaboration Between Brains
Linxing (Preston) Jiang, supervised by Raj Rao
Multi-Location Droplet Management for Digital Microfluidics
Sarang Joshi, supervised by Luis Ceze
Kernel Support for Paravirtaulized Guest OS
Shibin (Jack) Xi, supervised by Shwetak Patel, Elliot Saba
2017
Winner, 2017 Best Senior Thesis Award
The Methods of Interlacing Polynomials
Kuikui Liu, supervised by Shayan Oveis Gharan
Winner, 2017 Best Senior Thesis Award
Respeak: A Voice-based, Crowd-powered, and Accessible Speech Transcription System
Pooja Sethi, supervised by Richard Anderson
Semi-Supervised Spatial Knowledge Transfer with Deep Generative Models
Kousuke Ariga, supervised by Andrzej Pronobis
Automated Classification of Adult Cough Recordings into Wet vs. Dry with Applications to Pulmonary Disease Assessment
Jiayao Clara Lu, supervised by Shwetak Patel, Elliot Saba
Preventing Signedness Errors in Numerical Computations in Java
Christopher Mackie, supervised by Michael Ernst
Successive Convexification for Trajectory Planning: Analysis of Two Problems
Irina Tolkova, supervised by Dieter Fox
Synthesis of Parallel Tree Programs with Domain-Specific Sympbolic Compilation
Nate Yazdani, supervised by Ras Bodik
Evaluating Digital Financial Services for Financial Inclusion in Southern Ghana
Sarah Yu, supervised by Richard Anderson
Learning Large-Scale Topological Maps Using Sum-Product Networks
Kaiyu Zheng, supervised by Andrzej Pronobis, Raj Rao
2016
Winner, 2016 Best Senior Thesis Award
Navigating a 2D Virtual World Using Direct Brain Stimulation
Darby Losey, supervised by Rajesh Rao
Third-Party Content on the Web: A Visual Study
Christopher Blappert, supervised by Franziska Roesner, Tadayoshi Kohno
Contributions to Vega
Ryan Russell, supervised by Jeffrey Heer
2015
TR15-01: PDF Winner, 2015 Best Senior Thesis Award
Probability Type Inference for Flexible Approximate Programming
Brett Boston, supervised by Dan Grossman
TR15-02: PDF
Tleilax: Porting Tor to Arrakis
Sunjay Cauligi, supervised by Tom Anderson
TR15-03: PDF
EKG Monitoring and Arrhythmia Detection
Amaris Chen, supervised by Bruce Hemingway
TR15-04: PDF
Automated Analysis of Paper-Based Immunoassay Tests
Krittika D’Silva, supervised by Gaetano Borriello & Paul Yager
TR15-05: PDF
The Wisdom of Multiple Guesses
Ryan Drapeau, supervised by Johan Ugander and Carlos Guestrin
TR15-06: PDF
Extending Streaming Features for Myria
Yuqing Guo, supervised by Magdalena Balazinska
TR15-07: PDF
Tabletop Manipulation
Dylan Holmes, supervised by Emanuel Todorov
TR15-08: PDF
Peer-to-peer Data Transfer in Resource Constrained Environments
Shahar Levari, supervised by Gaetano Borriello & Richard Anderson
TR15-09: PDF
OBA Research & Development
Aengus McMillin, supervised by Alan Borning
TR15-10: PDF
A Web Based Tool for Labeling the 3D World
Aaron Nech, supervised bySteve Seitz & Richard Newcombe
TR15-11: PDF
Talk Space: Developing the Online Salon
Karthik Palaniappan, supervised by Alan Borning
TR15-12: PDF
Identification of Unstructured Language Indicating Multiple Objects
Vivek Paramasivam, supervised by Luke Zettlemoyer
TR15-13: PDF
Distributed Sampling in a Big Data Management System
Dan Radion, supervised by Dan Suciu
TR15-14: PDF
Algebraic Simplification for the Herbie Project
Alex Sanchez-Stern, supervised by Zachary Tatlock
TR15-15: PDF
Understanding Charts in Research Papers: A Learning Approach
Noah Siegel, supervised by Ali Farhadi
TR15-16: PDF
LeagueSpeak: The Language of Skill in Leage of Legends
King O. Xia, supervised by James Fogarty
2014
TR14-01: PDF
POMDP-Based Interaction and Interactive Natural Language Grounding with a NAO Robot
Maxwell Forbes, supervised by Rajesh Rao
TR14-02: PDF
Running N-body Use Cases on Myria
Lee Lee Choo, supervised by Magdalena Balazinska
TR14-03: PDF
Verification Games Type Systems
Nathaniel Mote, supervised by Michael Ernst
TR14-04: PDF
PNA: Protein-Nucleic Acid Complex Structure Prediction
Raymond Zhang, supervised by Martin Tompa
TR14-05: PDF Winner, 2014 Best Senior Thesis Award
DCDN: Distributed Content Delivery for the Modern Web
Nick Martindell, supervised by Tom Anderson & Arvind Krishnamurthy
TR14-06: PDF
Data Purchase Advisor: Cost-Effective Data Acquisition for Shared Data Analysis
Martina Unutzer, supervised by Magdalena Balazinska
TR14-07: PDF
Investigation into Measuring Blood Pressure with a Mobile Phone
Molly Moen, supervised by Gaetano Borriello
TR14-08: PDF
DigiTaps
Vaspol Ruamviboonsuk, supervised by Richard Ladner
TR14-09: PDF
Modeling Relational Vocabulary for Grounded Language Acquisition
Caitlin Harding, supervised by Luke Zettlemoyer
TR14-10: PDF
Spectral Graph Theory, Expanders, and Ramanujan Graphs
Christopher WIlliamson, supervised by James Lee & Anup Rao
TR14-11: PDF
Eyes-Free Error Detection and Correction of Speech Dictation on Mobile Devices
Rochelle Ng, supervised by Richard Ladner
TR14-12: PDF
On a Competitive Secretary Problem
Eric Lei, supervised by Anna Karlin
2013
TR13-01: PDF
Traceur: Inferring Variable Control Flow Using Synoptic With Multiple Relation Types
Timothy Vega, supervised by Michael Ernst
TR13-02: PDF 1, PDF 2, PDF 3
Monitors: Keeping Informed on Code Changes [PDF 1]
News and Notification: Propagating Releveant Changes to Developers [PDF 2]
Refinements and Git Integration with Notifications and Monitoring [PDF 3]
Christopher Dentel
supervised at ETH Zurich by Christian Estler, Dr. Martin Nordio, & Prof. Dr. Bertrand Meyer
supervised at UW by David Notkin
TR13-03: PDF 1, PDF 2, PDF 3
Contract Inserter: A Tool for Automatically Generating and Inserting C# Code Contracts
Forrest Coward, supervised by Michael Ernst
TR13-04: PDF
ODK Tables Graphing Tool
Nathan Brandes, supervised by Gaetano Borriello
TR13-05: PDF
Probabilistic Co-Adaptive Brain-Computer Interfacing
Matthew Bryan, supervised by Rajesh Rao
TR13-06: PDF
Stroke Rehabilitation Through Motor Imagery Controlled Humanoid
Priya Chagaleti, supervised by Rajesh Rao
TR13-07: PDF
Analyzer: Integrated Tools to Guide the Application of Machine Learning
Christopher Clark, supervised by Oren Etzioni
TR13-08: PDF
Considering Accuracy and Diversity when Creating Ensembles of Classifiers
Michael Fain, supervised by James Fogarty
TR13-09: PDF
ODK Tables Maps
Christopher Gelon, supervised by Gaetano Borriello
TR13-10: PDF
Appliance Reader
Antonius Denny Harijanto, supervised by Richard Ladner
TR13-11: PDF
Towards a Theory of Multiparty Information Complexity
Samuel Hopkins, supervised by Paul Beame
TR13-12: PDF
Instance-Based Recognition of Screen-Rendered Text in a System for Pixel-Based Reverse-Engineering of Graphical Interfaces
Stephen Joe Jonany, supervised by James Fogarty
TR13-13: PDF
Identifying Idiomatic Language at Scale
Grace Muzny, supervised by Luke Zettlemoyer
TR13-14: PDF
Identifying Application Breakage Caused by Virtualization
Steven Portzer, supervised by Arvind Krishnamurthy
TR13-15: PDFWinner, 2013 Best Senior Thesis Award
An API For Touch-Free Interfaces For Andriod Devices
Leeran Raphaely, supervised by Gaetano Borriello
TR13-16: PDF
ODK Tables: Improving the Custom Views
Heidi So, supervised by Gaetano Borriello
TR13-17: PDF
Leveraging Data Invariants in Model Interfernce for Test Case Generation
Roykrong Sukkerd, supervised by Michael Ernst
2012
TR12-01: PDF
InvariMint: Modeling Logged Behavior with Invariant DFAs
Jenny Abrahamson, supervised by Michael Ernst
TR12-02: PDF
Quantum Compiler Optimizations
Jeff Booth, supervised by Aram Harrow
TR12-03: PDF
StopFinder: Improving the Experience of Blind Public Transit Riders with Crowdsourcing
Sanjana Prasain, supervised by Alan Borning
TR12-04: PDF
A Type System for Regular Expressions
Eric Spishak, supervised by Michael Ernst
TR12-05: PDF
Run-Length Encoding Markovian Streams
Jennifer Wong, supervised by Magdalena Balazinska
TR12-06: PDF
Expanding the Depth Cloud: How to Intelligently Improve Grasping
Matthew Mullen, supervised by Joshua Smith
TR12-08: PDF
Simultaneous Tracking of Two Hands Using Camshift
Eric Hare, supervised by Dieter Fox
TR12-07: PDF
A Cold Chain Data Visualization Tool
Melissa Winstanley, supervised by Ruth Anderson
TR12-09: PDFWinner, 2012 Best Senior Thesis Award
The Elan Programming Language for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays
Elliott Brossard, supervised by Carl Ebeling
TR12-10: PDF
The Friendbo Attention Bar: Improving Engagement with Web Feeds on Social Networking Sites
Greg Bigelow, supervised by James Landay
TR12-11: PDF
Namaste: A Yoga Activity Logging Sensor
Milda Zizyte, supervised by Shewtak Patel
TR12-12: PDF
Efficient MapReduce Applications
Finn Parnell, supervised by Luis Ceze
TR12-13: PDF
ODK Tables: A Customizable Data Management Application for Android
Hilary Worden, supervised by Gaetano Borriello
TR12-14: PDF
A Synchronization Protocol for ODK Tables and ODK Aggregate
Dylan Price, supervised by Gaetano Borriello
TR12-15: PDF
Computer Security in the Undergraduate Curriciulum
Miles Sackler, supervised by Tadayoshi Kohno
2011
TR11-01: PDF
Improving DHT Routing Performance in Harmony using Client Caching
Allison Obourn, supervised by Tom Anderson
TR11-03: PDF
Smart Connect: Developing an SMS-Based Communcations Systems for Health Clinics in Vietnam
Krysta Yousoufian, supervised by Richard Anderson
TR11-04: PDF
Improving performance of prototype recognition in Prefab
Orkhan Muradov, supervised by James Fogarty
TR11-05: PDFWinner, 2011 Best Senior Thesis Award
LIFEGUARD: Locating Internet Failure Events and Generating Usable Alternate Routes Dynamically
Robert Colin Scott, supervised by Tom Anderson
TR11-06: PDF
Towards Practical Brain-Computer Interfaces: Hierarchical Learning and Source Estimation
Willy Cheung, supervised by Rajesh Rao
TR11-07: PDF
Improving Open Data Kit Collect’s Multiple Choice Data Entry Methods
Jeffrey Beorse, supervised by Gaetano Borriello
TR11-08: PDF
Runtime Verification of Portable Programming Interfaces
Jeff Rasley, supervised by Justin Cappos
2010
TR10-01: PDF
Modeling a Lattice-Traversing Robot
Albert Chiu, supervised by Eric Klavins
TR10-02: PDF
Haptic Laser
Erik Rosenkrantz Dennison Turnquist, supervised by Shwetak Patel
TR10-03: PDF
The Cinematic Sandbox: Utilizing Video Game Engines for Rapid Prototyping of Animated Films
Nicholas Garrett, supervised by Barbara Mones
TR10-04: PDFWinner, 2010 Best Senior Thesis Award
Applications of the IP Timestamp Option to Internet Measurement
Justine Sherry, supervised by Tom Anderson
TR10-05: PDF
Iterative Design and Implementation of an Educational Platform for Shared Computing Contexts
Sunil Garg, supervised by Richard Anderson
TR10-06: PDF
Deployment and Evaluation of an Educational Platform for Shared Computing Contexts
Clint Tseng, supervised by Richard Anderson
TR10-07: PDF
MultiViewer Imaging Viewer: Automated Calibration PET Phanton Analysis Project
Yogesh Saletore, supervised by Linda Shapiro
2009
TR09-01: PDF
Node Containment in the Seattle Testbed
Cosmin Barsan, supervised by Justin Cappos
TR09-02: PDF
Simulating Hand Interaction in a Virtual Environment with Open Dynamics Engine and CyberGlove
Nick Nunley, supervised by Miro Enev
TR09-03: PDFWinner, 2009 Best Senior Thesis Award
Real-Time Classification of Everyday Fitness Activities on Windows Mobile
Alireza Bagheri Garakani, supervised by James Fogarty
2008
TR08-01: PDF Winner, 2008 Best Senior Thesis Award
Maintaining Intelligibility of ASL Video in the Presence of Data Loss
Sam Whittle, supervised by Richard Ladner
TR08-02: PDF
Parallel N-Body Simulation Using Problem Space Promotion
Brandon Farrell, supervised by Larry Snyder
TR08-03: PDF
Exploring New Applications for Parallel Programming: Envisioning a New Realm
David Tepper, supervised by Larry Snyder
2007
TR07-01: PDF
Connecting Diets to Disease: Using Data-Mining to Find Links between Food Comsumption and Chronic Diseases
Alex Zheng, supervised by Rajesh Rao
TR07-02: PDF
Tagged Representations in WIL
Daria Craciunoiu, supervised by Craig Chambers
TR07-03: PDF
Multicore ZPL
Steven P. Smith, supervised by Larry Snyder
TR07-04: PDF
Implementing NOT EXISTS Predicates over a Probabilistic Database
Ting-You Wang, supervised by Dan Suciu
TR07-05: PDFWinner, 2007 Best Senior Thesis Award
Context-Based Arithmetic Coding for the DCT: Achieving high compression rates with block transforms and simple context modeling
Kyle Littlefield, supervised by Richard Ladner
2006
TR06-01: PDF Winner, 2006 Best Senior Thesis Award
Feature-Based Classification of the Mouse Eye Images
Jenny Yuen, supervised by Linda Shapiro
2005
TR05-01: PDF Winner, 2005 Best Senior Thesis Award
Text Segmentation and Grouping for Tactile Graphics
Matthew Renzelmann, supervised by Richard Ladner