Awards & Achievements
We are transitioning to a new interface, and some award records may be temporarily unavailable. All existing records are being migrated and will be accessible soon.
For any related queries, please contact aaronlee@smu.edu.sg.
Senior Area Chairs (SAC) Highlights
at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), for the paper, "SeCuRepair: Semantics-Aligned, Curriculum-Driven, and Reasoning-Enhanced Vulnerability Repair Framework".
The SAC Highlight is an award given by the Senior Area Chairs to recognize one or a small number of papers from their area that they consider particularly outstanding. Selected papers exemplify qualities such as originality, significance, technical excellence, reproducibility, or potential positive impact on the field. Typically, the award is given to less than 1% of all submissions. These papers are independent of the Best Paper Committee's selection.
Best Themed Paper
at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), for the paper, "CoSToM: Causal-oriented Steering for Intrinsic Theory-of-Mind Alignment in Large Language Models".
Best Themed Paper Award recognizes the best paper within the conference's special annual theme. The selection process starts with 158 nominated papers (7% of accepted main conference papers). After two rounds of review, 30 papers (1.3% of accepted papers) are selected for paper awards. Finally, 2 out of 30 papers are selected for the Best Themed Paper Award.
Senior Area Chairs (SAC) Highlights
at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), for the paper, "DR-Arena: an Automated Evaluation Framework for Deep Research Agents".
The SAC Highlight is an award given by the Senior Area Chairs to recognize one or a small number of papers from their area that they consider particularly outstanding. Selected papers exemplify qualities such as originality, significance, technical excellence, reproducibility, or potential positive impact on the field. Typically, the award is given to less than 1% of all submissions. These papers are independent of the Best Paper Committee's selection.
at Security CTF at the Cisco Connect Singapore 2026.
Honourable Mention
at the ACM Designing Interactive Systems, DIS 2026, for the paper, "Group Conversational Agents: A Review of Designs that Support and Shape Group Interaction".
Top 5% of all submissions to ACM DIS 2026.
2026 PAKDD Early Career Research Award
at the The 30th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD).
One of the most prestigious early-career awards in the KDD field, this award recognizes an individual within the first 10 years after their PhD for outstanding research contributions, leadership, and service, with at most one recipient (or none) selected each year; notable prior awardees include Evangelos (Vagelis) Papalexakis (UCI, USA), Tanmoy Chakraborty (IIIT, India), Feida Zhu (SMU, Singapore), and Yang Yu (NanjingU, China).
for the Micron Technology Track at the National AI Student Challenge
Honourable Mention
at the ACM CHI 2026 conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, for the paper, "Who You Explain To Matters: Learning by Explaining to Conversational Agents with Different Pedagogical Roles".
Top 5% of all submissions to ACM CHI 2026.
SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award (Runner Up)
from the SPEC Research Group (RG), a group within the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), at the 17th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE), for her dissertation paper, "Log-Driven Automated Software Reliability Engineering".
The SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award is an annual award that aims to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental system analysis in general.
at the Deep Learning Week 2026
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
at the 48th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026), for the paper, "UniCoR: Modality Collaboration for Robust Cross-Language Hybrid Code Retrieval".
Top 1-2% of all submissions (less than 10% of accepted papers)
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
at the 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026), for the paper, "Think Like Human Developers: Harnessing Community Knowledge for Structured Code Reasoning".
Top 1-2% of all submissions (less than 10% of all accepted papers).
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
at the 48th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026), for the paper, "UniCoR: Modality Collaboration for Robust Cross-Language Hybrid Code Retrieval".
Top 1-2% of all submissions (less than 10% of accepted papers)
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
Honourable Mention
at the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), for the paper, “Who You Explain To Matters: Learning by Explaining to Conversational Agents with Different Pedagogical Roles”.
Top 5% of submissions to CHI 2026 (6,730 submissions)
at the LotusHacks 2026