Research Awards & Achievements
SMU College of Graduate Research Studies (CGRS)
Distinguished Tool Paper
Honourable Mention
at the 34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2025), for the paper, “Achilles: A Formal Framework of Leaking Secrets from Signature Schemes via Rowhammer”.
Honorable Mentions 34th USENIX Security Symposium recognise a select group of submissions that rank among the most exceptional in the conference. These distinctions highlight work that demonstrates outstanding technical merit, originality, and potential impact within the security and privacy research community.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) Best Paper Award
from the IEEE Computer Society for the paper, “Stealthy Backdoor Attack for Code Models”.
The best paper of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) that was published in the preceding year (2024).
Best Paper Honourable Mentions
at the IEEE VIS 2025, for the paper, “Qualitative Study for LLM-assisted Design Study Process: Strategies, Challenges, and Roles”.
Best Paper Award
at the 16th International Workshop on Computational Transportation Science (CTS 2025), for the paper, "Multi-terminal berth allocation with vessel rerouting and container transfers via shuttle vessels".
This is best paper award for the annual international workshop on computational transportation science. One of the most prestigious conferences on transportation intersects with optimization and computing.
Most Influential Paper Award
at the 25th IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS 2025) for the paper, “Deep Learning for Just-in-Time Defect Prediction”.
The award is given on a ten-year basis to authors of papers published at QRS ten years ago that were judged to have the greatest impact on the theory or practice of software quality, reliability, and security in the ten years since its initial publication.
Best Student Paper Award
Outstanding Poster
at the 1st CCF Graph Machine Learning Conference, for the poster, "Towards Graph Foundation Model: Multi-domain Pre-training and Multi-task Adaptation"
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
2nd Place
FSE2025 Test-of-Time Award
at the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2025) for the paper, “How practitioners perceive the relevance of software engineering research”.
The Test of Time Award is given annually recognizing highly influential papers published ten years ago.
Honourable Mention
at the ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25) for the paper, “Prompting an Embodied AI Agent: How Embodiment and Multimodal Signaling Affects Prompting Behaviour”.
This has been awarded to papers in the top 5% of submissions.
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
Honourable Mention
at the ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25) for the paper, ““I can run at night!”: Using Augmented Reality to Support Nighttime Guided Running for Low-vision Runners”.
This has been awarded to papers in the top 5% of submissions.
Best Paper Award
at the 2025 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI2025) for the paper, “ImageInThat: Manipulating Images to Convey User Instructions to Robots”.
Mark Weiser Best Paper Award
Best Full Paper Award
from the Association for Information Systems Special Interest Group on Blockchain Innovations and Technologies (AIS SIGBIT) at the 13th SIGBIT Workshop on Information Technology and Systems on Web3 Ecosystem and Artificial Intelligence (Bangkok, Thailand) for the paper, “A Community-Driven Framework to Evaluate Factors Influencing NFT Buyers”.
The best paper among the 11 presented full papers in the workshop.
Best Paper Runner Up Award
at the Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2024) for the paper, “IRL for Restless Multi-armed Bandits with Applications in Maternal and Child Health”.
Only 2 of 543 submissions receive the award.
2024 Google South Asia & Southeast Asia Research Awards
Google South Asia & Southeast Asia Research Awards are focused on supporting exceptional computer science research in the region. Through this program we also intend to strengthen long-term collaborative relationships with faculty working on problems that will impact how future generations use technology.
For their papers,
Enabling Diverse Tiny Model Selection on Microcontroller-based IoT devices
Robust and Efficient Alignment for Integrity in Large Language Model Powered Conversational Agents
INFORMS Outstanding SIG Paper in Urban Transportation
at INFORMS 2024, for the paper, “Multiobjective Stochastic Optimization: A Case of Real-Time Matching in Ride-Sourcing Markets”.
The INFORMS TSL Best Paper Award is given once a year to an outstanding paper in the field of transportation science and logistics.