---
markdown_generated_at: "2026-10-14"
title: "QIF 2021 North America"
url: "https://www.qualcomm.com/research/university-relations/innovation-fellowship/2021-north-america"
description: "Apply for the 2021 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for the North America region. Application details, participating universities, and areas of interest."
---

# QIF 2021 North America

## 2021 QIF North America Program Details

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 **teamwork**. Our goal is to enable students to pursue their futuristic innovative ideas.

[Learn about our other QIF programs](https://www.qualcomm.com/invention/research/university-relations/innovation-fellowship)

Winners

Finalist Selections

Finalist Instructions

Selected Abstracts

Application Process

Areas of Interest

Participating Universities

Timeline

We are pleased to announce the 16 winners of Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (North America) 2021. Congratulations to the winners!

We commend each of the finalist teams on excellent presentations and high quality of the proposals.

| School | Innovation Title | Students | Recommender(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| CMU | Open World 3D Dynamic Reconstruction For Smart Cities | Gengshan Yang, Dinesh Reddy Narapureddy | Srinivasa Narasimhan, Deva Ramanan |
| Michigan / Washington | Machine Learning Designs for Universal Decoders | Mohammad Vahid Jamali, Xiyang Liu | Sewoong Oh, Hessam Mahdavifar |
| MIT | Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design for Efficient LiDAR-Based Autonomous Driving | Zhijian Liu, Yujun Lin | Song Han |
| MIT | Long Term Multi-Agent Hybrid Prediction through Online Factored Concept Inference and Continual Hierarchical Learning | Xin Huang, Meng Feng | Brian Williams |
| MIT | On-Device NLP Inference and Training with Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design | Hanrui Wang, Han Cai | Song Han, Hae-Seung Lee |
| Princeton | Optimization Inspired Neural Architectures for 3D Reconstruction | Zachary Teed, Ankit Goyal | Jia Deng |
| Princeton | Quantum Computation for Wireless Networks | Sai Srikar Kasi, Minsung Kim | Kyle Jamieson |
| Purdue University | A Generalized Framework for Optimizing ML Workload Acceleration in Processing-in/near Memory Architectures | Mustafa Ali, Tanvi Sharma | Kaushik Roy |
| Stanford | Implicit Representations for Compositional, Generalizable Scene Understanding | Hongxing Yu, Michelle Guo | Jiajun Wu |
| UCB | Practical Lifting for Verification of Trusted Platform Software | Kevin Cheang, Federico Mora | Sanjit Seshia, Alvin Cheung |
| UCLA | A Stochastic Compute-In-Memory Neural Network Accelerator with Variable Precision Tuning | Jiyue Yang, Tianmu Li | Sudhakar Pamarti, Puneet Gupta |
| UCSD | Best-of-Class Digital PLL Frequency Synthesis IC Development | Eslam Helal, Amr Eissa | Ian Galton |
| University of Toronto | Learning Long-Range 3D Object Detectors for High-Speed Autonomous Driving | Anas Mahmoud, Juan Carrillo | Steven Waslander |
| USC | Federated Deep Learning: On-device Learning of CV and NLP with Transformers and CNNs | Chaoyang He, Saurav Prakash | Salman Avestimehr |
| UT Austin | Federated Generative Learning for Channel Estimation in mmWave and THz systems | Akash Doshi, Manan Gupta | Jeffrey Andrews |
| Washington | Enhanced Self-Interference Suppression with Phase Noise Cancellation for use in Full-duplex Radios | Yi-Hsiang Huang, Xichen Li | Chris Rudell, Visvesh Sathe |

## Fellowship Winners and Finalists

The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship began in 2009, and has continued to grow with the addition of more universities, more candidates, and expansion to our research centers internationally. Take a look at a list of all our fellowship winners and finalists from years past:

[Winners](https://www.qualcomm.com/research/university-relations/innovation-fellowship/winners)

[Finalists](https://www.qualcomm.com/research/university-relations/innovation-fellowship/finalists)