The Technology Entrepreneur Center in The Grainger College of Engineering has announced the recipients of the 2025 campuswide innovation awards. Jiawei Liu, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is the Illinois Innovation Award recipient.
The Illinois Innovation Award honors University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign students for excellence in groundbreaking innovation or translational research that addresses real-world problems and has the potential to make a significant impact. Liu received a $20,000 monetary award from Grainger Engineering. Since 2007, the program has awarded $470,000 to student innovators.
Jiawei Liu is dedicated to advancing the reliability and resilience of the entire machine learning (ML) stack, spanning multiple critical layers: developing reliable code-generating language models, creating automatic test generators that have identified over 300 critical bugs in major ML frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch, safeguarding the software foundations of AI and addressing hardware-level reliability issues. These efforts collectively lead to more robust and trustworthy ML systems, essential for applications ranging from health care to autonomous driving.
Liu also contributes to open-source code generation tools and evaluation models, including EvalPlus and StarCoder2, which have been widely adopted by both the research community and industry leaders such as Google, Meta and Amazon. Notably, his evaluation framework, EvalPlus, has been downloaded 750,000 times for rigorous evaluation of LLM-generated code.
Liu said, “Winning this prestigious award is both an incredible encouragement and a significant milestone in my research journey. I’m deeply grateful to be part of the University of Illinois, a place that fosters innovation and empowers students to fearlessly tackle real-world challenges through cutting-edge research. This recognition encourages me to continue pushing the boundaries of my work, which focuses on making future software systems more reliable and resilient.”
Image: L-R: Jed Taylor, Assistant Dean for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Grainger Engineering; John Thode, Clinical Professor for Innovation, Leadership, and Engineering Entrepreneurship, Grainger Engineering; Jiawei Liu, Illinois Innovation Award recipient and Melissa Graebner, Associate Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Gies College of Business
Read the full story on the Technology Entrepreneur Center's website.