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Open Source Software Prize

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The Stanford Open Source Software Prize is a prize awarded to an open source software project that makes noteworthy contributions to the advancement of open source software development as scholarly work, demonstrates expertise and significant impact on research in its field, and acts as an exemplary model of open source best practices.

2024 Prize Winner

FlashAttention

FlashAttention is an algorithm that speeds up attention and reduces memory footprint to improve the efficiency of Transfomer models. The development of this algorithm is particularly impactful as the context length of large language models (LLMs) continues to scale up, and there has been a remarkable adoption of FlashAttention across industry as a result. The latest version, FlashAttention-2, was released in July 2023 to great excitement in scholarship and industry.

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2024 Prize Winner

Generalized Random Forests (GRF)

Generalized Random Forests (GRF) is a R package for forest-based statistical estimation and inference. In addition to providing methods for causal effect estimation, it provides a framework to create forests for new statistical tasks. GRF has demonstrated exceptional scholarly impact and acts as an exemplary model of open source best practices, including licensing, documentation, organization, and community management.

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Woman working in laser lab
Peter Wegner, ''Monument to Change as It Changes"

Eligibility

To be considered for the Stanford Open Source Software Prize, the project must be included in the OpenSource@Stanford Projects Registry.

Nominations for the 2025 Prize will begin early next year.

(Note that we are currently focused on open source software intrinsic to research and scholarship, rather than administrative projects.)

Recognition

The prize will be awarded on a project-basis, with the winning project's team receiving:

  • Prize assertions to the ORCID records of contributing team members
  • A small accompanying cash prize
  • Recognition as the winners of the Stanford Open Source Software Prize

Each year, the prize winner(s) will be announced at the annual Stanford Data Science CORES Symposium alongside the other Open Science prizes awarded by CORES.