Some of the top computer science engineers at the University of Washington showed off their latest work this week at the annual Research Showcase hosted by The Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
The event features a day of research presentations and technical sessions before wrapping up with a poster event in the evening, where attendees had a chance to learn about more than 100 student projects.
Seattle venture firm Madrona hands out the “Madrona Prize” each year to projects that combine excellent research with commercial potential.
This year’s winner is using AI to help support team communication in remote work environments. One of its projects, called Meeting Bridges, aims to alleviate the burden of online meetings by taking advantage of “meeting artifacts” such as notes and recordings to boost asynchronous collaboration.
The team is working on a separate project, which features an AI agent that automatically shares useful information in group chats by analyzing prior social signals within a group.
The team is led by primary research author and PhD candidate, Ruotong Wang, and advised by UW professor Amy Zhang, head of the Allen School’s Social Futures Lab.
Madrona is certainly familiar with the potential for AI technologies to improve virtual meetings, given its investment in Read AI, a Seattle startup that just raised $50 million.
Madrona also awarded two runner-up teams at the poster event: “Knowledge Boosting During Low-latency Interference,” which is developing a way to enhance the performance large models on wearable devices, and “Interpreting Nanopore Signals to Enable Single-Molecule Protein Sequencing,” which is working on a new method to sequence proteins using nanopores.
The “People’s Choice” award went to two groups:
- AHA: A Vision-Language Model for Detecting and Reasoning over Failures in Robotic Manipulation
- AltGeoViz: Facilitating Accessible Geovisualization
Check out past winners of the Madrona Prize here.
Related: How AI is reshaping the University of Washington computer science school
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