The final winners are selected via a two step process: (i) reviewers from Qualcomm R&D selects a list of finalists who should prepare a presentation about their proposal; (ii) after finalists presentation, the judging panel selects the winners.
QInF: United States
Winners
Finalists
Application
FAQs
Important Notice
Any questions with logistics please email innovation.fellowship@qualcomm.com. Please see below legal forms that must be filled out before stipends are processed. All Finalists who receive a stipend of 600 or more will receive a 1099 from Qualcomm for 2012 taxes.
QInF 2012 Winners
| School | Students | Recommenders | Innovation Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| UCB |
Asif Khan Chun Yeung |
Sayeef Salahuddin Chenming Hu |
Negative Capacitance FET with sub 60 mV/dec swing and high Ion for Ultra-low Power High Performance Mobile Computing |
| CMU |
Chris Harrison Robert Xiao |
Scott E Hudson | Synthetic Sensors and Interfaces |
| Columbia |
Michael Lekas Sunwoo Lee |
James Hone Ken Shepard |
CMOS Compatible Graphene Nanoelectromechanical Systems for Next Generation RF Design |
| UCB |
Sameer Agarwal Aurojit Panda |
Ion Stoica Sam Madden |
QuickSilverDB: Interactive Queries on Unbounded Data With Bounded Errors |
| UCLA |
James Xu Yan Wang |
Greg Pottie Bruce Dobkin |
Multi-Context Driven Activity Classification through Three-dimensional Body Motion via Wearable Sensors |
| UIUC |
Rakesh Komuravelli Matthew Sinclair |
Sarita Adve Vikram Adve |
Addressing the Hardware Challenges of Tightly Coupled Heterogeneous Architectures |
| Stanford |
Alexander Neckar Sam Fok |
Kwabena Boahen | Neuromorphics: Programmable Analog Computation Through Reconfiigurable Digital Communication |
| UCLA |
Xufeng Kou Murong Lang |
Kang L. Wang | Topological Insulators Based Spin-Polarized FET |
We thank all the students and faculty who participate in the QInF competition. The Finalists for QInF 2012 are announced below.
Important Notice
Any questions with logistics please email innovation.fellowship@qualcomm.com. Please see below legal forms that must be filled out before stipends are processed. All Finalists who receive a stipend of 600 or more will receive a 1099 from Qualcomm for 2012 taxes.
Finals Venues:
We will hold the finals at three of Qualcomm's R&D Centers in Santa Clara, New Jersey, and San Diego. Finalists will be allocated to the appropriate finals location.
QInF 2012 East Coast Finals: Bridgewater, NJ
| School | Students | Recommenders | Innovation Title |
| Princeton | Ting-Jung Lin Xianmin Chen |
Niraj K. Jha |
Ultra-Low-Power Dynamically Reconfigurable 3D Multicore Architectures |
| Columbia | Christoffer Dall Jeremy Christian Andrus |
Jason Nieh Gernot Heiser |
Moby Computing: Everywhere at once |
| UMD | Tsung-Hsueh Lee Haoyu Wang |
Pamela Abshire Alireza Khaligh |
Human Power Plant for Health Monitoring Wireless Body Power Network |
| CMU | Robert Xiao Chris Harrison |
Scott E. Hudson |
Synthetic Sensors and Interfaces |
| Rutgers | Chieh-Jen Ku Yang Zhang |
Yicheng Lu |
Reconfigurable Wireless Multi-mode Biosensor Array |
| CMU | Anuj Kumar Anuj Tewari |
Matthew Kam Dan Siewiorek |
Speech Recognition for Mobile Applications |
| Columbia | Michael Lekas Sunwoo Lee |
James Hone Ken Shepard |
CMOS Compatible Graphene Nanoelectromechanical Systems for Next Generation RF Design |
| MIT | Soheil Feizi Omid Abari |
Muriel Medard Vladimir Stojanovic |
A Joint Source-Channel-Network Coding By Using Compressive Sensing: A Power Efficient Sensing, Communication and Denoising Scheme |
| Columbia | Yan Wang Mengu Sukan |
Shih-Fu Chang Steven Feiner |
Inferring Scene Geometry and Object Semantics for Multi-User Hand-Held Augmented Reality |
- Venue: Qualcomm Research Center New Jersey
- Address: 500 Somerset Corporate Blvd, Bridgewater, NJ 08807
- Date: April 24, 2012, 1:30pm–7:00pm
QInF 2012 NorCal Finals: Santa Clara, CA
| School | Students | Recommenders | Innovation Title |
| CMU | Heng-Tze Cheng Feng-Tso Sun |
Martin Griss |
Representing and Recognizing Unseen User Context Using Semantic Audio Words for Mobile Applications |
| UCB | Wenchao Li Anuj Tewari |
Sanjit A Seshia Bjoern Hartmann |
VeriFun: Cell Phone Games to Verify Cell Phone Designs |
| UCB | Noah Johnson Kevin Chen |
Dawn Song |
Automatic Security Analysis for Android Apps |
| UIUC | Rakesh Komuravelli Matthew Sinclair |
Sarita Adve Vikram Adve |
Addressing the Hardware Challenges of Tightly Coupled Heterogeneous Architectures |
| CMU | Le Nguyen Pang Wu |
Joy Ying Zhang |
Structured Motion Modeling for Probabilistic Indoor Positioning |
| MIT | Aditya Khosla Jianxiong Xiao |
Antonio Torralba Aude Oliva |
Image Inception: How to make an image more memorable? |
| Stanford | Jesse Cirimele Leslie Wu |
Scott Klemmer Larry Chu |
Dynamic Shared Displays: Integrating Attention-Awareness, Aids, and Resources Will Improve Medical Teams Decision Making, Coordination, and Outcomes. |
| UIUC | Murph Finnicum Nathan Dautenhahn |
Sam King |
Building Secure Robot Applications |
| Stanford | Yang Li Fan Wang |
Leonidas Guibas |
Exploring Causality in Mobility Data |
| MIT | Andrea Colaco Ahmed Kirmani |
Vivek K Goyal |
CoFeCam: Compressive Feature Sensing -- Low cost and complexity, direct feature sensing for consumer applications |
- Venue: Qualcomm Research Silicon Valley (QRSV)
- Address: 3165 Kifer Road, Santa Clara, CA 95051
- Date: April 26, 2012, 1:30pm–7:00pm
QInF 2012 SoCal Finals: San Diego, CA
| School | Students | Recommenders | Innovation Title |
| UCB | Shinwon Kang Siva Thyagarajan |
Ali M Niknejad |
Wireless Vision for NextGen Augmented Reality |
| UCLA | James Xu Yan Wang |
Greg Pottie Bruce Dobkin |
Multi-Context Driven Activity Classification through Three-dimensional Body Motion via Wearable Sensors |
| UCSD | Hasan Faraby Anna Alexander |
Prabhakar Bandaru Yuan Taur |
A New Electrical Element for High Frequency Electronics: The Cinductor (a Carbon Nanotube based high energy density inductive element) |
| USC | Mehrdad Najibi Hsin-Ho Huang |
Peter A. Beerel |
Performance-Constrained Low-Power Asynchronous ASIC Design |
| UCLA | Xufeng Kou Murong Lang |
Kang L. Wang |
Topological Insulators Based Spin-Polarized FET |
| UCLA | Juan Alzate Pramey Upadhyaya |
Kang L. Wang |
Voltage-Controlled Spintronic Switches for Next Generation Magnetoelectric RAM (MeRAM) |
| UCSD | Eunho Noh Walter Talbott |
Virginia de Sa Tim Curran |
Real-time EEG analysis for improving memory |
| Columbia | Lev Givon Wenze Li |
Aurel A. Lazar |
In Vivo Verification and Control of Drosophila Brain Functions Using a Tetherless Nanophotonic Interface and a GPU-Based Neurokernel |
| UCB | Milos Jorgovanovic Matthew Weiner |
Borivoje Nikolic David Tse |
Why Can't Wireless Terminals Just Get Along? A Low Complexity Approach to Implementing Wireless Cooperation |
| UCB | Asif Khan Chun Yeung |
Sayeef Salahuddin Chenming Hu |
Negative Capacitance FET with sub 60 mV/dec swing and high Ion for Ultra-low Power High Performance Mobile Computing |
| Stanford | Alexander Neckar Sam Fok |
Kwabena Boahen |
Neuromorphics: Programmable Analog Computation Through Reconfiigurable Digital Communication |
| UCLA | Yuanzhang Xiao Jie Xu |
Mihaela van der Schaar |
Spectrum and Energy Efficient Design In Spectrum Sharing |
| UCB | Sameer Agarwal Aurojit Panda |
Ion Stoica Sam Madden |
QuickSilverDB: Interactive Queries on Unbounded Data With Bounded Errors |
- Venue: Qualcomm Research Center (QRC) San Diego
- Address: 5665 Morehouse Drive, San Diego, CA 92121
- Date: May 1, 2012, 1:30pm–7:00pm
Finalist Program Schedule
1:30–2:00 Registration and mixer
2:00–5:30 Presentations, with breaks
6:00–7:00 Dinner and finalist prizes
Application Deadline: February 15, 2012 (23:59h PST)
We believe that research and development is the key to harnessing the power of imagination and to discovering new possibilities. We are excited to announce a new kind of fellowship that promotes Qualcomm’s core values of innovation, execution and partnership. Our goal is to enable students to pursue their futuristic innovative ideas.
Qualcomm is inviting applications for the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2012 from outstanding PhD students in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at:
- Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
- Columbia University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- Princeton University
- Rutgers University
- Stanford University
- UC Berkeley (UCB)
- UC Los Angles (UCLA)
- UC San Diego (UCSD)
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
- University of Maryland
- University of Southern California (USC)
We will be awarding fellowships to EIGHT winning teams for the 2012-13 academic year. Teams are limited to two students.
Each of the eight winning teams will be awarded a $100,000 fellowship for submitting the most innovative proposals. The respective academic departments at each university will administer funds to the winning students for their fellowship work and research expenses for the academic year of 2012–13. Total funding for eight teams x two students x $50,000 each = $800,000.
Areas of Interest
We invite teams to submit proposals focussing on the a number of specific areas within EE and CS, which fall into the following broad categories:
- Advances in Communication Techniques and Theory
- Internet of Things
- Mobile Applications
- Mobile Graphics & Computational Photography
- Power Optimization
- RF-Related Topics
- Secure & Autonomic Mobile Devices
- Semiconductor Research
- System Architecture & Programming Models
- User Experience
Specifically, proposals will have to be tagged with one or more of the following areas:
- 3D Modelling
- Asynchronous Logic/Communication
- Autonomic Computing
- Computational Photography
- Connected Home
- Dynamic Wireless Multicast
- Energy Harvesting
- GPU Computing
- Graphene/Carbon Based Electronics
- Hardware Acceleration for Mobile Applications
- HCI across Multiple Screens
- Image Synthesis
- Interference Management among Multiple Base-Stations
- Low-Cost Radio (Crystals, Radio front-end integration)
- Low-Power Multi-Processor/Multi-Core Designs
- Low-Power RF Techniques and Devices
- Mobile Computing Languages
- Mobile Privacy (Content Control)
- Mobile Security
- Mobile Web Technologies
- Monolithic 3D ICs
- Multi-Hop and Mesh Networks
- Network Coding for Wireless Networks
- Neuromorphic Computing
- Parallel Programming
- Personal Cloud
- Proximal Communication among Peer Nodes
- Real-Time Rendering
- Semiconductor Nanowire
- Spintronics/Straintronics
- Touchless Human-Computer Interfaces (HCI)
- Wide-Area Wireless Networks using High-Frequency Spectrum
- Wireless Docking
- Wireless Health
- Wireless Systems for Unlicensed/Shared Spectrum
Timeline
- Application Deadline: February 15, 2012 (23:59h PST)
- Finalists Announcement: March 20, 2012
- Finalists Presentation Submission: April 9, 2012
- Finalists Presentation: Second Half of April, 2012
- Winners Announcement: May 2012
- QInF Day: September 2012
Application Process
Each team shall submit an innovation proposal that must include:
- Introduction and problem definition
- Innovation proposal and relation to the state of the art
- The one-year horizon of the project (even if the proposal is a multi-year project)
- The strength of the team for achieving the proposal milestones.
See FAQ for more details.
Winners will be selected through a two-phase process:
1. Finalists selection: Applications must be submitted online by the deadline above. Each application must include (in PDF or Word format):
- Three page proposal summarizing your innovative idea
- Letter from one or more faculties recommending the innovation
- Each student’s CV
All proposals will be reviewed internally by a team of Qualcomm researchers and based on this review, approximately 30 teams will be selected to be finalists.
2. Winners selection: Each finalist team must prepare a 15 minute presentations for the judges. Presentation must be in PowerPoint or PDF format. The presentation generally includes:
- The idea
- The differentiating factors from state of the art
- The execution plan / strength of the team
The eight winning teams will be chosen from within these finalists after they present to the judging panel.
The official rules for the innovation fellowship are available for download.
All QInF-related information will be announced on this webpage. Please check back regularly for updates.
Submission of new proposals is now closed.
Already submitted proposals can NOT be updated anymore.
Please send additional recommendation letters via email to innovation.fellowship@qualcomm.com.
Faculty & Mentor
In addition to the faculty advisor(s) to guide the fellowship research, Qualcomm will also provide industry experts to mentor the teams, as well as regular collaboration opportunities with Qualcomm Research & Development to further assist with projects. Successful projects will be reevaluated after one year for further research funding from Qualcomm.
More Info?
Do you need further Information? Please direct your questions to innovation.fellowship@qualcomm.com
Application Rules
Can students from different advisors form a team?
Absolutely, yes.
Can students without advisors participate?
Sure, but they are encouraged to find a like-minded faculty to recommend the innovation
Are newly admitted students eligible to apply for the fellowship?
Yes, students who start PhD in the Fall of 2012 are also eligible to apply for fellowship. The advisor's recommendation can mention that the student is registered for fall.
Can you have one student from QInF School, and one from outside?
No, since the money is awarded as a fellowship through the school
Can the two team members be from different QInF schools?
Yes, for example one from Berkeley and one from MIT
Are there any citizenship or permanent residency requirements?
None
Can a team of one apply?
Nope - we are encouraging teamwork as one of the key aspects
Can Visiting Scholars or Post Docs be applicants?
Unfortunately, visiting scholars are not eligible to apply for the fellowship this time. You are welcome to discuss your proposal and be guided by your visiting scholar associate or your faculty advisor, but both applicants must be EE/CS graduate students
Can someone form two separate two-person teams and enter the Qualcomm Fellowship competition with two project proposals and be affiliated with two teams?
You are very welcome to submit two applications, with two different teams
Can the same pair of students submit two applications
Sure, just go through the application process twice and submit two completely different sets of application
Is there a preference/requirement on the seniority of the students?
Since this is a research focus fellowship, we are limiting this to PhD students. This means that each student must be enrolled in the PhD program for the whole academic year of 2012-2013 to win the Fellowship (i.e., enrolled into PhD program starting Fall 2012 AND continuing in the PhD program until Spring 2013).
Are there any enrollment requirements?
Students need to be enrolled in full-time PhD program for entire academic year 2012-13
Proposal
What does "innovation proposal" mean?
| - | Introduction, which describes the problem and current state of the art (i.e. limitations or lack of current solutiuons) |
| - | Proposal, which describes the innovation idea, and what you propose to do |
| - | One year horizon, which explains the target goals for one year and preferably also includes the long-term milestones |
| - | Team effort, which describes each team member's strength and proposed contribution to the innovation for achieving the milestones. Also describe why this team is better suited for this proposal than any one else. |
What size of proposal do you expect?
approx 3 pages
Who owns the intellectual property from the applications?
Students / University
Who owns the intellectual property developed during the course of the Fellowship?
Students / University
Does the proposal have to be the same as the research plan for your Ph.D. under your supervisor for the next year? I.e., can the proposal be for a project that is not your main area of research?
The proposal can indeed be different from your thesis
If the winning proposal is for a non-primary research project, how many hours of work per week do you expect the winners to spend on their projects?
There is no strict requirement on how much time you are expected to spend. We expect the winning projects to be interesting and exciting enough that the winners will want to spend time on the project. In addition to the Fellowship, Qualcomm will assist by providing mentor, and the recommending faculty would be another likely resource for help. Internships in the summer are also possible
Is there any preference on incremental vs. long-term ideas?
No, both types of proposals are welcome
Should the proposed ideas be commercializable?
Not at all. It could be pure research