Bytes

Congratulations to Associate Professor Reza Shokri for receiving the distinguished 2023 Intel Outstanding Researcher Award. This accolade celebrates his exceptional contributions to designing algorithms that audit the privacy risks of machine learning models and his development of the innovative open-source tool, "Privacy Meter." Researchers from his team extended the Privacy Meter tool to analyse privacy risks of federated learning, and validated the method on Intel's OpenFL federated learning framework.

Assistant Professor Manuel Rigger has achieved a remarkable double win, earning two prestigious awards. He clinched the 2024 EuroSys Best Paper Award for his team's innovative paper, "Validating Database System Isolation Level Implementations with Version Certificate Recovery," presented at the EuroSys conference in Athens, Greece, from April 22 to 25, 2024.

Adding to this accolade, Asst Prof Rigger has also been honored with the Amazon Research Award for his groundbreaking work on "Democratising Database Fuzzing." This esteemed award celebrates high-quality research with the potential to make a significant impact on both the research community and society.

Congratulations to Professor Xiao Xiaokui for winning the prestigious 2024 SIGMOD Test-of-Time award for his paper, "PrivBayes: Private Data Release via Bayesian Networks," published in June 2014. This annual award celebrates the most influential paper from a decade ago, recognising its profound impact on research, products, and methodologies over the intervening decade. Prof Xiao’s work on PrivBayes has been hailed for its significant contributions to synthetic data generation, resonating deeply within the data management community and beyond.

We are pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Ambuj Varshney has been awarded the prestigious 2024 Google Research Scholar Program Award for his outstanding contributions to the field of Systems and Networking.

This esteemed award will support his innovative project, "From Supply Chains to Personal Belongings: Designing Zero-Battery Trackers," which aims to develop energy-efficient and privacy-safe tracking devices.

As major technology giants continue to expand their offloading networks, the development of these low-power, flexible form factor trackers could significantly enhance the accessibility and utility of current tracking technologies, such as Apple AirTags.

A team of researchers which include Professors Tan Kian Lee, Ooi Beng Chin, and Anthony Tung, has won the ACM SIGMOD Systems Award for Apache SINGA. The SIGMOD Systems Award is awarded to an individual or set of individuals to recognise the development of a software or hardware system whose technical contributions have had significant impact on the theory or practice of large-scale data management systems. Apache SINGA is a distributed machine learning library that facilitates the training of large-scale machine learning models over a cluster of machines.

We are honoured to achieve this ranking for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, based on the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2024.

Read more.

Between 29 February to 3 March, Team absinthe went against 64 strong teams and emerged second place, just behind the Seoul National University team. This result bodes well for NUS Computing to bring back the first ever ICPC World Finals Championship medal later in April 2024.

Visit the ICPC Asia Pacific website to learn more about the competition.

The workshop was held from 9 to 10 March and aims to help participants considering pursuing graduate studies in a Master's or PhD programme in Computing to acquire, develop, and exercise research skills in Computer Science and Information Systems. It also featured presentations on the latest research and a hands-on game design session led by Senior Lecturer Anand Bhojan. A total of 40 participants attended the programme.

Read more about the programme.

Exciting news from NUS Fintech Summit 2024! A whopping 600 guests attended the grand finale on 19th Jan. 4 out of 37 teams emerged as winners in a hackathon that was held over two weeks, with a Grand Prize of SGD $5000. The summit also had more than 15 workshops hosted by industry players such as Coinbase, Binance, Ripple, Endowus and more. Read more about the event at NUS Fintech Society.

Congratulations to Dr Atreyi Kankanhalli for winning the Association for Information Systems (AIS) Sandra Slaughter Service Award. This award recognises longstanding members who have provided leadership and service within the association such as through past Council positions; association committees; journal editorial boards, conference involvement; SIGs, chapters, or colleges. She received the award at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) held from 10 to 13 Dec 2023 in Hyderabad, India.

Congratulations to Pranjal Dutta, a Research Fellow under Associate Professor Divesh Aggarwal's research group, for winning the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India Doctoral Dissertation Award. He was awarded for his dissertation titled, "A Tale of Hardness, De-randomisation and De-bordering in Complexity Theory."

This award recognises the best doctoral dissertation in Computer Science and related disciplines from a degree-awarding institution based in India for each academic year, running from July 1 of one year to June 30 of the following year.

Dutta is also a part of the NUS-NCS Joint Laboratory for Cyber Security.

Congratulations! PhD Student Hoang Ton Nu Huong Giang has accepted a placement in the Association for Information Systems (AIS) Entrepreneurial Innovation Fellowship for the cohort of 2024. The program will run for a year and is generously supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Congratulations to Dr Hahn Jungpil, Li Junyi and collaborator for winning Best Conference Paper Award (Second Runner-up) for their paper, "Meta-Organizational Learning Through Digital Consensus," at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). It was held from 10 to 13 Dec 2023 in Hyderabad, India.

Congratulations to the following Computing undergraduates who received the NUS Achievement Awards (NAA) on 28 October at the University Cultural Centre. The NAA is the most prestigious and only University-level award that honours the exceptional achievements of student life beyond academics. Awardees: Yan Yushan, Zhou Yujie, Kok Yu Xian, Chu Jia Ming, Guok Wei Jie, Benecia Tang and Aishwarya Hariharan Iyer.

Congratulations to Team NUS Finovators for winning second place at the Chengdu 80 Global FinTech Competition. It was held from 26 October to 2 November 2023 in Chengdu China. Comprising five MSBA and one Computer Science student, the team designed a solution called NUSight which can provide users with accessible and unbiased news analysis with a quantitative risk perspective.