Research Awards & Achievements
SMU College of Graduate Research Studies (CGRS)
et al. at the 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2026), for the paper, “A11YRepair: Bridging Web Accessibility Barriers via Knowledge-Enhanced Divide-and-Conquer Repair”
et al. at the 35th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2026), for the paper, “Characterizing and Repairing Obsolete Android GUI Tests under UI Evolution”
as Principal Investigator from SMU and IBM team member, representing SMU and IBM teams respectively, at the 2026 SICC Awards, for the “SMU-IBM AI Supply Chain Risk Model Delivers US$35M Saving by Singapore Management University and IBM Singapore Pte Ltd” collaboration.
Launched in 2015, the Singapore International Chamber of Commerce (SICC) Awards are built on the conviction that collaboration is very often the quickest way for companies, from all sectors and of all sizes, to innovate, grow and sustain themselves.
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.
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).
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
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)
IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award
at the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER 2026), for the paper, "What You Trust Is Insecure: Demystifying How Developers (Mis)Use Trusted Execution Environments in Practice".
Top 1-2% of submissions (less than 10% of accepted papers).
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), at the 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026), for the paper, "Towards Understanding and Characterizing Vulnerabilities in Intelligent Connected Vehicles through Real-World Exploits".
Best Paper Candidate
ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award
from the ACM SIGSOFT for his dissertation “Towards Robust, Secure, and Privacy-Aware Large Language Models of Code”.
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) at the 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2025), for the paper, '"My productivity is boosted, but …" Demystifying Users’ Perception on AI Coding Assistants'.
2025 Test of Time Award
at the 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2025) for the paper, “Detecting product review spammers using rating behaviors”.
The Test of Time Award is given for CIKM papers published at least ten years ago, and that have had an important and sustained impact on the research community. Each year, only 1 or 2 papers are selected for the award.
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
from ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (ACM SIGSOFT), at the 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2025), for the paper, “Seeing is Fixing: Cross-Modal Reasoning with Multimodal LLMs for Visual Software Issue Repair”.
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished papers are given to at most 10% of the papers accepted at an ACM SIGSOFT-sponsored conference.