Computing @ SMU
Creating Our Digital Future

SMU School of Computing and Information Systems Dean Professor Pang Hwee Hwa is preparing the School to meet industry demands for technically proficient professionals with a big-picture view.

Faculty Awards & Achievements
Congratulations to our esteemed faculty

for their outstanding achievements and holistic contributions!

✨ Prof Robert H. DENG - Zhongni Distinguished Educator Award 
✨ Senior Lecturer Kiruthika RAMANATHAN - Most Promising Teacher 
✨ Associate Prof TAN Kar Way - Teaching Excellence in Postgraduate Professional Programmes
✨ Associate Prof WANG Hai - Excellent Teacher 
✨ Associate Prof Kyong Jin SHIM - SMU-X Excellent Teacher 

in photo (R-L) with SCIS Dean Prof Pang, at the Appreciation Lunch and Awards Ceremony 2025, jointly organised by SMU Centre for Teaching Excellence and SMU College of Graduate Research Studies.

SMU Centre for Teaching Excellence Awards 2025
Postgraduate Professional Master of IT in Business
SMU Master of IT in Business Ranks 2nd in Asia, 24th Globally

The SMU MITB maintains its ranking amongst 164 programmes across 31 locations in the 2025 QS Global Master’s in Business Analytics Rankings.

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Latest Awards & Achievements 

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October 2024
Best Student Paper Award
was awarded to:
Tingwei Zhu
Tongtong Xu
Kui Liu
Jiayuan Zhou
Xing Hu
Xin Xia
Tian Zhang
OUB Chair Prof David LO

at the 40th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2024) for the paper, “An Empirical Study of Automatic Program Repair Techniques for Injection Vulnerabilities”

Awards Faculty Research (Publications) Faculty Research (Publications)
September 2024
Outstanding PhD Thesis Award 2024
was awarded to:
Assistant Prof Djordje ZIKELIC

from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA).

The award rewards the top 8% of the thesis defended at ISTA each year.

Awards Faculty
September 2024
Outstanding Reviewer Award
was awarded to:
Assistant Prof ZHANG Zhiyuan

at the 18th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV2024). 

This award recognizes 198 outstanding reviewers, representing the top 2.7% of the 7,293 ECCV2024 reviewers, for their timely and high-quality contributions.

Awards Faculty
September 2024
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
was awarded to:
PhD Candidate SUN Zhensu
DU Xiaoning
PhD Graduate YANG Zhou
LI Li
OUB Chair Prof David LO

from ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (ACM SIGSOFT), at the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2024) for the paper, “AI Coders Are among Us: Rethinking Programming Language Grammar towards Efficient Code Generation”.

Top 10% accepted paper of the conference.

Awards Postgraduate Research (Publications) Research (Publications) Faculty Research (Publications)
September 2024
Winner of SMU Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition 2024
was awarded to:
PhD Graduate Ratnadira WIDYASARI

organised by SMU College of Graduate Research Studies (CGRS).

Awards Research (Publications) Postgraduate Research Students
September 2024
Distinguished Paper Award
was awarded to:
Krishnendu Chatterjee
Amir Kafshdar Goharshady
Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshad
Mehrdad Karrabi
Assistant Prof Djordje ZIKELIC

at the 26th International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM 2024) for the paper, “Sound and Complete Witnesses for Template-based Verification of LTL Properties on Polynomial Programs”

Awards Research (Publications) Faculty Research (Publications)
September 2024
Outstanding Paper Award for the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
was awarded to:
Wen SONG
Xinyang CHEN
Qiqiang LI
Assistant Prof CAO Zhiguang

from the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society for the paper, “Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling via Graph Neural Network and Deep Reinforcement Learning”

Awards Research (Publications) Faculty Research (Publications)
July 2024
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Reviewer Award
was awarded to:
Associate Prof Christoph TREUDE

at the 32nd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE2024).

This is awarded to 12 of the 189 PC members of the technical research track.

Awards Faculty

Recent Undergraduate Students Awards

November 2025
Finalist (Student Category) was awarded to Zara TEO Xiao Xuan;

at The Cybersecurity Awards 2025 by the Association of Information Security Professionals (AiSP).

In its eighth year, The Cybersecurity Awards 2025 seeks to honour outstanding contributions by individuals and organisations, to local and regional cybersecurity ecosystems.

May 2025
Top 10 Asia Young Women Rising Tech Stars 2025 was awarded to Crystal Layla LUI;

at the Asia Women Tech Leaders Award 2025.

November 2024
Student Volunteer Recognition Programme (SVRP) - Bronze Award was awarded to Axel TAN Xian Lin;

from the Association of Information Security Professionals (AiSP).

Recent Undergraduate Students at Competitions Awards

November 2025
1st was awarded to Sathwik CHILUVERU;

at the NCS Sunshine.AI Hackathon 2025.

October 2025
1st was awarded to TAI Wei Sin; Htet Shwe Win THAN;

at the UBS Global Coding Challenge 2025.

October 2025
2nd was awarded to Isaac PUA Jin Lit; Julian Dominic LIAW;

at the UBS Global Coding Challenge 2025.

Recent Postgraduate Research Publications with Awards

November 2025
October 2025
Distinguished Paper Award was awarded to
PhD Candidate HU Changshuo
;
PhD Candidate MA Xiao
;
Xinger HUANG; Yiran SHEN;
Assistant Prof MA Dong
;

at the UbiComp / ISWC 2025. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT)., for the paper, “LR-Auth: Towards Practical Implementation of Implicit User Authentication on Earbuds”.

The Distinguished Paper Awards are assigned every year to 3-4% of papers published by IMWUT ((SCIS A*)) in the previous year. This year, 8 papers were selected for an award from 208 accepted papers (3.8%).

Recent Postgraduate Research Student Awards

December 2025
DSO-AISG Incentive Award was awarded to
PhD Candidate LIM Jia Peng
;
PhD Candidate Sidney TIO Xi Rong
;

and is a joint initiative between AI Singapore (AISG) and DSO, designed to inspire post-graduate students to explore research related to large language models (LLMs).

October 2025
2025 Google PhD Fellowship was awarded to
PhD Candidate RUAN Shaolun
;

from Google, in the Quantum Computing category. 

His research interests include Data Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction.

December 2024
2024 ByteDance Scholarship was awarded to
PhD Candidate SUN Zhensu
;

from ByteDance

Recent Postgraduate Professional Alumni Awards

August 2025
2025 Singapore 100 Women in Tech (SG100WIT) List Honourees was awarded to
MITB Graduate LIM Yean Sam
;
Associate Prof SUN Qianru
;
PhD Graduate Ratnadira WIDYASARI
;

Organised by the Singapore Computer Society (SCS), in partnership with SG Women in Tech and Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). 

The list recognises and celebrates women based in Singapore who have been inspiring and have made significant contributions to the tech industry.

May 2025
Top 50 Asia Women Tech Leaders 2025 was awarded to
EngD Graduate JEYARAMAN Brindha Priyadarshini
;

at the Asia Women Tech Leaders Award 2025.

Recent Research Awards

November 2025
October 2025
Distinguished Paper Award was awarded to
PhD Candidate HU Changshuo
;
PhD Candidate MA Xiao
;
Xinger HUANG; Yiran SHEN;
Assistant Prof MA Dong
;

at the UbiComp / ISWC 2025. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT)., for the paper, “LR-Auth: Towards Practical Implementation of Implicit User Authentication on Earbuds”.

The Distinguished Paper Awards are assigned every year to 3-4% of papers published by IMWUT ((SCIS A*)) in the previous year. This year, 8 papers were selected for an award from 208 accepted papers (3.8%).

Recent Faculty Awards

December 2025
ACM Distinguished Member 2025 was awarded to
Associate Prof Hady W. LAUW
;

from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ACM has named 61 new Distinguished Members. 

All the 2025 inductees are registered members and were selected by their peers for significant technical achievements and/or volunteer service. The ACM Distinguished Member program recognizes up to 10 percent of the worldwide ACM membership for their technical achievements and/or service to the field.

October 2025
Top Reviewer was awarded to
Assistant Prof Djordje ZIKELIC
;

at the Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025).

Top 10% of the reviewers at NeurIPS 2025.

October 2025
SMU Teaching Excellence Awards - Recipients was awarded to
Prof Robert H. DENG
;
Senior Lecturer Kiruthika RAMANATHAN
;
Associate Prof TAN Kar Way
;
Associate Prof WANG Hai
;
Associate Prof Kyong Jin SHIM
;

in photo (R-L) with SCIS Dean Prof Pang, at the Appreciation Lunch and Awards Ceremony 2025, jointly organised by SMU Centre for Teaching Excellence and SMU College of Graduate Research Studies.

For the award categories,

  • Prof Robert H. DENG (Zhongni Distinguished Educator Award)
  • Senior Lecturer Kiruthika RAMANATHAN (Most Promising Teacher)
  • Associate Prof TAN Kar Way (Teaching Excellence in Postgraduate Professional Programmes)
  • Associate Prof WANG Hai (Excellent Teacher)
  • Associate Prof Kyong Jin SHIM (SMU-X Excellent Teacher)

The SMU Teaching Excellence Awards recognise and celebrate the significance of teaching as a complex and multi-faceted profession. These university-level awards honour faculty members for their holistic contributions to peer development, student development, innovative instructional approaches, effective pedagogical practices and course design. SMU is also committed to adopting processes that promote gender equity in the recognition of teaching excellence.

Recent Alumni Awards

November 2025
SMU Alumni Awards 2025 was awarded to
Aaron TAN
;
Aditya LESMANA
;
Kelvin CHNG
;
LIN Fengru
;
Seyed Nazhath FAHEEMA
;

at the inaugural SMU Alumni Awards 2025 on 12 November 2025 at SMU Hall, with President Tharman Shanmugaratnam as Guest of Honour. 

Launched in celebration of SMU’s Silver Jubilee, the SMU Alumni Awards marked the University’s highest recognition of alumni achievement. To be conferred every five years, the Awards honour SMU alumni and associate alumni who have distinguished themselves through professional excellence, innovation, and service to society.

September 2025
Impact Leader Excellence Award - Individual was awarded to
Jeremy LEE
;

at the 2025 Sustainability Impact Awards, organised by The Business Times and UOB.

SMU alumnus Jeremy Lee received the award for advancing sustainable household solutions and cutting single-use plastics.

August 2025
2025 Singapore 100 Women in Tech (SG100WIT) List Honourees was awarded to
MITB Graduate LIM Yean Sam
;
Associate Prof SUN Qianru
;
PhD Graduate Ratnadira WIDYASARI
;

Organised by the Singapore Computer Society (SCS), in partnership with SG Women in Tech and Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). 

The list recognises and celebrates women based in Singapore who have been inspiring and have made significant contributions to the tech industry.