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Augmented Human Lab Earns Two Honourable Mention Awards at ACM CHI 2026

Two papers from the Augmented Human Lab have earned Honourable Mention Awards at ACM CHI 2026, the world’s leading conference in human-computer interaction. The award recognises the top 5% of accepted papers for their originality, rigour, and potential impact.

The award-winning papers:

VisceroHaptics: Investigating the Effects of Gut-based Audio-Haptic Feedback on Gastric Feelings and Gastric Interoceptive Behavior
First author: Mia Huong Nguyen (PhD Student)

Zenflow: Investigating MR Transitions for Enhancing Sleep and Relaxation
First author: Praveen Sasikumar (PhD Student)

Both papers are co-authored by Associate Professor Suranga Nanayakkara, who leads the Augmented Human Lab.

From gut feelings to better sleep, the work reflects the lab’s focus on designing technologies deeply attuned to the human body – sensing what we feel, shaping how we rest, and expanding what interaction with technology can mean. 

The papers will be presented at CHI 2026 in Barcelona, Spain, from 13 to 17 April 2026.

Congratulations to the team on this outstanding achievement!

NUS Computing Team Wins Best Paper Award at MMM 2026

A new model that teaches AI to understand and create music – across audio waveforms, symbolic notation, and text – has won Best Paper Award at the 32nd International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM 2026), held in Prague, Czech Republic from 29 to 31 January 2026.

The paper, Integrating Symbolic and Waveform Music into Large Language Models  was authored by Tu Teng and Liu Xiaohao (National University of Singapore), Ma Yunshan (Singapore Management University), Qi Ji (Tsinghua University), and KITHCT Chair Professor Chua Tat Seng.

Most existing music AI models work with either symbolic notation – such as scores and sheet music – or audio waveforms, but not both. The team’s framework, UniMuLM, is described as the first to integrate these two representations within a single language model. It uses a hierarchical encoder that aligns musical information at the beat, bar, and phrase levels, allowing the model to capture both fine-grained detail and broader musical structure.

UniMuLM achieved performance competitive with specialised models on music understanding tasks, while outperforming existing baselines – including GPT-4o – on music theory reasoning and melody completion.

This achievement is a testament to the team's work and to the depth of multimodal AI research at NUS Computing – where the question isn't just how machines process information, but how they might one day understand something as deeply human as music.

Two NUS Computing Faculty Named MSRA StarTrack Scholars 2026

Two faculty members from NUS Computing have been selected as StarTrack scholars by Microsoft Research Asia – a global programme that embeds outstanding young faculty members within one of the world’s leading industrial research labs for a three-month research visit opportunity.

Assistant Professor Bian Yatao and Sung Kah Kay Assistant Professor Li Jialin, both from the Department of Computer Science, were chosen from a competitive international field. Each will work alongside Microsoft researchers with access to the organisation’s computing resources, datasets, and global research network.

Their projects:

• Bian Yatao – Semi-Supervised Grounded Reasoning for Healthcare: Synergizing EMPO with Expert Supervision
• Li Jialin – Building Distributed Consensus for Multi-Agent LLM Systems

The StarTrack programme aims to foster close academic exchange and collaboration between Microsoft Research Asia and young scholars from esteemed international universities and academic research institutions. 

Congratulations to Yatao and Jialin on this well-deserved recognition!

Read more about the MSRA StarTrack Scholars here.

The AI for Social Good (AI4SG) Lab, led by Assistant Professor Lee Yi-Chieh from the Department of Computer Science, has earned four Honourable Mention Awards at ACM CHI 2026 – the world's premier conference in human-computer interaction. The awards recognise the top 5% of accepted papers for their originality, rigour, and potential for impact.

CHI 2026 received a record 6,700 paper submissions. The AI4SG Lab contributed 11 full papers to the conference, with three of the four awarded papers led by NUS Computing PhD students as first authors.

The four award-winning papers are:

• AI-exhibited Personality Traits can Shape Human Self-concept through Conversations
  First author: Jingshu Li (PhD student, Computer Science, Year 4)
• Designing Computational Tools for Exploring Causal Relationships in Qualitative Data
  First author: Han Meng (PhD student, Computer Science, Year 3)
• Affective and Goal-Oriented Factors of Relationship Formation in the Digital Therapeutic Alliance: A Longitudinal Study of Mental Health Chatbots
  Co-authored by: Yi-Chieh Lee with collaborators from the University of Auckland
• Who You Explain to Matters: Learning by Explaining to Conversational Agents with Different Pedagogical Roles 
  First author: Zhengtao Xu (PhD student, Computer Science, Year 2)
  

Together, these papers span education, mental health, AI personality, and qualitative research methods, reflecting the breadth of the lab's mission to harness AI for real-world social benefit.

The papers will be presented at CHI 2026 in Barcelona, Spain, from 13 - 17 April 2026.

Congratulations to the team on this outstanding recognition! 

NUS School of Computing is pleased to share that NUS Presidential Young Professor Zhang Jiaheng, has been awarded the Robert Brown Promising Researcher Award under the Ministry of Education Singapore (MOE) Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 2 Grant. 

The award recognises promising early-career researchers with strong potential to lead impactful research.

As part of the AcRF Tier 2 grant, his project, “Verifiable Large Language Models via Scalable Zero-Knowledge Proofs,” will receive funding over three years to develop methods that make large language models more transparent and verifiable, strengthening trust and accountability in AI systems.

In addition to the Tier 2 award, Prof Zhang will receive a S$100,000 top-up grant through the Robert Brown Promising Researcher Award to further support his research.

Established to support junior faculty, the award enables researchers to deepen their work and compete for larger grants as they progress in their careers. Named in honour of Robert Brown, it recognises those with strong potential to contribute to Singapore’s research landscape.

This achievement reflects the School’s commitment to advancing impactful research and supporting emerging academic leaders. 

Congratulations to Prof Zhang Jiaheng on this distinguished recognition!

What does sustained research impact look like over time? 

A recent study in Communications of the Association for Information Systems analysed more than 5,000 publications across leading Information Systems journals over two decades – and found that NUS Computing Professor Atreyi Kankanhalli is among the top 10 female authors in Information Systems research across both 2001-2010 and 2011-2020. 

Her inclusion across two decades places her among a small group of scholars with consistent research contributions at the highest levels of the field.

The study also highlights a broader trend: while women are increasingly represented in Information Systems, they remain underrepresented at the highest levels of research productivity – making sustained contributions like these all the more significant.

At NUS Computing, we are committed to building an environment where more women can contribute, lead, and thrive in research.

Congratulations to Professor Atreyi Kankanhalli on this milestone!

The SingaX team, comprising researchers from NUS Computing, A*STAR, and NTU, has placed second at the Embodied Agent Interface (EAI) Challenge at NeurIPS 2025, developing a method that improves AI performance by learning from past errors – without additional model training.

Competing against 48 international teams, the team achieved an average score of 84.32, ranking among the top performers in the challenge.

The competition focused on developing embodied, agentic systems capable of interpreting natural language instructions and executing complex tasks in simulated environments. These systems must reason over long-horizon instructions, track intermediate states, and generate executable action sequences – challenges where existing approaches can fall short due to brittle prompt design and inconsistent outputs.

SingaX proposed an iterative prompt induction framework that analyses failure patterns during development and refines task instructions accordingly. This approach improves performance on new tasks without requiring additional model training, and offers a cost-efficient method applicable across different evaluation settings.

Team members include A*STAR Computing and Information Science (ACIS) Scholars: Niu Xinyuan and Chen Zhiliang (both NUS Computing PhD students in Computer Science), as well as Vernon Toh (NTU) and Li Yanchao (NTU).

Congratulations to the team on this achievement!

More information:
https://foundation-models-meet-embodied-agents.github.io/eai_challenge/#winners

NUS Computing Alumnus Wins Multiple International Best Paper Awards for Advancing Digital Inclusion

Congratulations to alumnus Dr Deng Yimeng and collaborators on receiving multiple international Best Paper Awards for their research on digital inclusion.

Their paper, “Inclusion by Design: Requirements Elicitation with Digitally Marginalised Communities,” received the 2024 Best Paper Award from MIS Quarterly, alongside the Senior Scholars Best IS Publication Award from the Association for Information Systems and the 2024 Bapna–Ghose Social Justice Best Paper Award from the INFORMS Information Systems Society.

Co-authored by Deng Yimeng (PhD IS, Class of 2016), Isam Faik, and Avijit Sengupta, the study advances a design-centred approach to digital inclusion. It argues that meaningful inclusion requires technologies to be designed in close partnership with marginalised communities, rather than through the adoption of one-size-fits-all digital solutions.

Drawing on the co-design of digital applications with farming communities in India and China, the paper introduces a novel methodology – design-based interpretive research – and proposes the concept of affordance translation to help bridge gaps between digital technologies and local contexts.Published in the March 2024 issue of MIS Quarterly, the paper highlights the School of Computing’s strength in rigorous, socially grounded information systems research, and its commitment to advancing technology that serves diverse communities.

Read the award-winning paper here: https://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol48/iss1/9/ 

We are pleased to congratulate Assistant Professor Warut Suksompong on his appointment as Associate Editor of Mathematics of Operations Research, a leading journal in the mathematical foundations of operations research.

Published by INFORMS, the journal features rigorous, peer-reviewed research on the theory and applications of operations research, including optimisation, algorithms, game theory, and decision sciences. 

As Associate Editor, he will play a role in shaping the field's scholarly direction by guiding the peer review of research at the frontier of mathematical and operational thinking. The appointment recognises Asst Prof Suksompong's research contributions and his standing in the global operations research community.

Join us in congratulating Professor Goh Khim Yong on his appointment as Senior Editor of Information Systems Research, one of the leading journals in the field of Information Systems.

This appointment recognises his research contributions and service to the global Information Systems research community.

Congratulations to Prof Khim Yong on this significant milestone!

We are pleased to announce that Associate Prof Qiao Dandan has been appointed Associate Editor at MIS Quarterly, one of the leading journals in the field of Information Systems.

Her appointment reflects her research contributions and service to the international Information Systems research community.

Congratulations to Associate Prof Dandan on this achievement!

NUS PhD Student Wins 2025 Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2025 for Advancing Long-Horizon AI Agents 

We’re proud to share that NUS Computer Science PhD student Zhou Zijian has won the Best Paper Award at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Multi-Turn Interactions in Large Language Models, selected from 230 submitted papers. The winning paper, “MEM1: Learning to Synergize Memory and Reasoning for Efficient Long-Horizon Agents”, was developed in collaboration with SMART (Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology) M3S programme and researchers from MIT.

MEM1 introduces a new reinforcement learning approach that allows AI agents to operate more efficiently across long, multi-turn tasks. Instead of storing every past interaction – a common limitation that leads to growing memory use and slower inference – MEM1 trains an agent to maintain a compact, dynamic internal state that keeps only the information that truly matters for ongoing reasoning. This results in significantly lower memory usage and faster performance across several benchmark tasks. 

The team has made the code and model open-source to support further research in long-horizon interactive AI.

Join us in congratulating Zhou Zijian and all collaborators on this outstanding achievement!

Distinguished Speaker Seminar with Prof Robert Tarjan: “Is Dijkstra's Algorithm Optimal?”

NUS Computing is pleased to host Prof Robert Tarjan, one of the world’s most influential computer scientists and a foundational figure in algorithms research, as part of our CS50 anniversary.

Prof Tarjan is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and a Turing Award laureate recognised for seminal contributions that shaped modern data structures and graph theory. His work continues to influence generations of researchers and practitioners in computing and beyond.

Seminar Details

Topic: Is Dijkstra’s Algorithm Optimal?
Date: Wednesday, 26 November 2025
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Venue: LT15, Block AS6

Chair: Prof Seth Gilbert (Head, Computer Science)

RSVP: Please register by 25 November, 11:59 PM at https://forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=Xu-lWwkxd06Fvc_rDTR-gm5x1Sp8M6RGscGRMyuul5JUQkRJQ1lTTlRJTzhGOFNHN0gwT1FWM09KQS4u&route=shorturl 

(Only for NUS Faculty,Staff & Students)

About the Seminar 

Dijkstra’s algorithm is one of the most enduring and widely taught algorithms in computer science. Beyond identifying shortest paths, it produces them in increasing order of length—a feature that has shaped decades of research in route planning and optimisation.

In this seminar, Prof Tarjan will discuss recent work he and his collaborators have undertaken that revisits a long-standing question: Is Dijkstra’s algorithm best possible? He will present findings that argue “yes”, alongside a brief look at alternative perspectives that suggest otherwise. The talk offers a rare window into the evolving landscape of algorithmic theory, guided by one of its most influential pioneers.

About the Speaker

Prof Robert Tarjan has held academic appointments at Cornell, Berkeley, Stanford, and NYU, and research roles at Bell Labs, NEC, HP, Microsoft, and Intertrust Technologies. He is known for pioneering many of the most efficient data structures and graph algorithms used today.

His accolades include:

• Nevanlinna Prize (1982)
• Turing Award (1986)
• Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award (1999)
  He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

This seminar is part of NUS Computing’s 50th anniversary celebrations, marking five decades of academic excellence, research leadership, and contributions to Singapore’s digital future.

More Information here

NUS FinTech Society clinches four prizes at ETHRome 25

Five members of the NUS Computing’s FinTech Society made an impressive showing at ETHRome 25, bringing home four prizes from one of Europe’s leading blockchain hackathons.

Held from 17–19 October 2025 at Talent Garden Roma, the hackathon drew more than 250 developers from across the world to tackle real-world challenges in AI, DeFi, and privacy.

Representing NUS were: 

• Chu Wei Rong – Year 4, Computer Science
• Poh Say Kong – Year 4, Computer Science
• Jeriel Chan Zhi Yang – Year 4, Computer Science
• Jefferson Lee Chun Yin – Year 4, Business Analytics
• Lim Teng Hong (Kevin) – Year 3, Information Security 

Also competing as solo developers, each member submitted individual projects and collectively earned:

• 1st Place (Civic) — Smart Nexus by Jefferson Lee
•  2nd Place (Civic) — Munus by Jeriel Chan
•  3rd Place (iExec) — ExecSwap by Poh Say Keong
• ENS Pool Prize — Trick or TrETH by Chu Wei Rong

“The final night was a true test of endurance — we barely slept, but seeing our projects come together was incredibly rewarding,” shared Wei Rong, Blockchain Co-Director of NUS FinTech Society.

ETHRome 25 featured a prize pool exceeding US$60,000, sponsored by blockchain companies including Civic, iExec, ENS, and Base. The NUS team’s wins highlight not just their technical expertise, but also NUS Computing’s growing strength in blockchain innovation and Web3 development.

Congratulations to the NUS FinTech Society for flying the NUS flag high in Rome!

Stay tuned for the full feature story.

Two NUS Computing Professors Among the World’s Most Highly Cited Researchers 2025 

We are proud to share that two faculty members from the NUS School of Computing — Distinguished Professor Yan Shuicheng and Professor Zhang Yang — have been named among the world’s Highly Cited Researchers 2025  by data analytics firm Clarivate. 

Among the fewer than one in 1,000 researchers globally recognised by Clarivate,  37 are from NUS this year — a reflection of our research community’s excellence and impact. The annual list identifies scientists whose work ranks among the top 1% of most cited globally, marking their strong influence in shaping their fields.

At NUS Computing, this recognition highlights our continued leadership in computer science and interdisciplinary research. The pioneering work of Distinguished Professor Yan and Professor Zhang continues to push boundaries across areas in artificial intelligence and computational biology.