Congratulations to the Winners of GW's 2024 Student Open Source Awards Program!
We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2024 Student Open Source Awards Program at The George Washington University. 2024 was the first year of our awards program and we were grateful to discover that GW has a strong open source community. Our talented students have showcased exceptional skills and effort in developing open-source software projects that contribute to the broader community. Thank you to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for making these awards possible and please check out the GW OSPO Student Award Program for details on how to apply and win in 2025.
Open Source Project Awards
- 1st Prize:
- Mahdi Baghbanzadeh for deepBreaks - An open-source software designed to analyze sequence data (such as DNA or amino acids) for genotype-phenotype associations using machine learning (ML). It addresses common challenges in sequence analysis, such as noise, nonlinear relationships, high data dimensionality, etc..
- 2nd Prize:
- Pingfan Hu for surveydown - A flexible, open-source platform for making surveys with R, Quarto, Shiny, and Supabase. With surveydown, you can design your survey using a Quarto document with markdown and R code, and easily convert it into a Shiny app. The survey data is stored in Supabase.
- Arjun Bingly, Sanchit Vijay, Kunal Inglunkar, and Erika Pham for GRAG - A Python package that lets users implement end-to-end RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) with ease. The package lets users seamlessly deploy a multitude of language models (LLMs), leveraging local deployment capabilities, quantization support, and effortless integration with vector stores.
- 3rd Prize:
- Joseph Kilgore for SimLogger - A method for logging simulation data in an easy and clean format. Never worry about losing data again, and always be prepared for when your PhD advisor asks "but what does this variable do across the simulation".
- Satya Phanindra Kumar Kalaga, Vedant Mahangade, Bharat Khandelwal, Prudhvi Chekuri for LAiSER - A tool that helps learners, educators and employers share trusted and mutually intelligible information about skills.
Individual Contributor Awards
We also recognize the outstanding contributions of individual students who have made meaningful impacts on public open-source projects:
- Mahdi Baghbanzadeh for their work on OmicsEye - I contributed a tool for performing high-dimensional correlation tests and visualizations. After using it, I identified ways to improve its performance, so I modified the code and pushed the updates to the repository. Since this was an internal lab project, no issue was posted before the direct push.
- Prudhviraju Chekuri for their work on LAiSER - I contributed to LAiSER, an open-source project by the GW Institute of Public Policy, by integrating the LLAMA 3.2-1b-it language model into the Extract module for enhanced skills extraction. This improvement was driven by LLAMA’s larger context window and better performance while only using half the memory compared to GEMMA 2b-it, making it easier to fine-tune on our data. Additionally, I implemented torch.compile to accelerate the inference of LLMs within LAiSER modules, resulting in faster and more efficient performance. I developed these enhancements using Kaggle Notebooks and Google Collaboratory for model experimentation, leveraged HuggingFace for model inference, and referred to PyTorch official documentation to set up torch.compile.
- Kayla Aburida for their work on ArcGIS StoryMaps - This project was a part of a DSSD contract with Insulate Ukraine. In utilizing the visualized data pulled from the Economist and Bellingcat Research, Insulate can target location in Ukraine that have been most affected by war to help rebuild windows.
Celebrating Excellence in Open Source
The GW Open Source Program Office (OSPO) is proud to support and encourage our students in their open-source endeavors. The goal of this award program is to foster a collaborative environment where students can develop software skills, improve research reproducibility, and prepare for successful careers in research and industry.
We extend our heartfelt congratulations to all the winners and participants. Your dedication and hard work are truly inspiring. We look forward to seeing the continued impact of your contributions in the open-source community.
Stay tuned for more updates and stories from our winners at the upcoming GW Open Source Conference on March 24-25, 2025, at the GW Student Center.
*assisted by Microsoft Copilot - prompt: Please help me write a quick blog post congratulating the winners of GW's 2024 Student Open Source Awards Program. Here is context about the program
- Original AI response
- Copilot
Sure, here's a draft for your blog post:
Congratulations to the Winners of GW's 2024 Student Open Source Awards Program!
We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2024 Student Open Source Awards Program at The George Washington University. This year, our talented students have showcased exceptional skills and creativity in developing open-source software projects that contribute to the broader community.
Open Source Project Awards
Undergraduate Category:
- 1st Prize: [Winner's Name] for [Project Name] - An innovative solution that [brief description of the project].
- 2nd Prize: [Winner's Name] for [Project Name] - A remarkable project that [brief description of the project].
- 3rd Prize: [Winner's Name] for [Project Name] - A creative approach to [brief description of the project].
Graduate Category:
- 1st Prize: [Winner's Name] for [Project Name] - A groundbreaking project that [brief description of the project].
- 2nd Prize: [Winner's Name] for [Project Name] - An impressive contribution that [brief description of the project].
- 3rd Prize: [Winner's Name] for [Project Name] - A noteworthy effort in [brief description of the project].
Individual Contributor Awards
We also recognize the outstanding contributions of individual students who have made meaningful impacts on public open-source projects:
- [Winner's Name] for their work on [Project Name] - [brief description of the contribution].
- [Winner's Name] for their work on [Project Name] - [brief description of the contribution].
- [Winner's Name] for their work on [Project Name] - [brief description of the contribution].
Celebrating Excellence in Open Source
The GW Open Source Program Office (OSPO) is proud to support and encourage our students in their open-source endeavors. The goal of this award program is to foster a collaborative environment where students can develop software skills, improve research reproducibility, and prepare for successful careers in research and industry.
We extend our heartfelt congratulations to all the winners and participants. Your dedication and hard work are truly inspiring. We look forward to seeing the continued impact of your contributions in the open-source community.
Stay tuned for more updates and stories from our winners at the upcoming GW Open Source Conference on March 24-25, 2025, at the GW Student Center.
Feel free to customize the names and project details as needed. Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to add!