2026 Celebration of Excellence

Chaoqi Liu is a senior in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he conducts research in robotic manipulation and learning-based control. His work focuses on diffusion policies, action representation, and scalable dynamics modeling, with publications at venues such as ICRA, RSS, and RA-L. He has collaborated with labs at UIUC, CMU, Columbia, and Harvard. He has received the James N. Snyder Award for Scholastic Achievement.

Jaclyn Rizzo is a 2nd year undergraduate in Information Sciences + Data Science. She is a recipient of the 2026 iSchool Ames Scholarship. At Illinois, she has participated in CHIME research and is a current Business & Operations Intern with the Illini Dads Association. Her interests are in data science, health informatics, and data analytics. In her free time she likes to run, ski, and cook.

Brendan is a freshman computer science student. He is a member of various clubs, including SIGGRAPH@UIUC, Illinois Data Science Club, and Illini Solar Car, among others. He loves to climb with the climbing club on Wednesdays and build projects on his down time or during club time. He hopes to continue his current interest in computer graphics and pursue a career path in it one day.

Sarah is currently an undergraduate senior, who will return next year to start her PhD. She is currently a lead course assistant for CS 374, and she has participated in CS STARS in the past. She is currently working with Professor Nancy M. Amato.

Suhaan is a freshman interested in CS and Astronomy research and loves buliding and tinkering. He is very interested in entreprenuership and has recently been named a G Fellow where he was chosen to pitch to leading investors from YC, a16z, and other top incubators as well as source startups and connect top startups to brilliant investors.

Jianwei is a Junior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, majoring in Computer Science and Statistics. As a recipient of the Franz Hohn and J.P. Nash Scholarship, his research focuses on Human-Computer Interaction and Spatial Computing. Jianwei has peer-reviewed work accepted at CHI 2026 and IEEE AIxVR 2026, where he investigates the interaction boundaries between intelligent agents and users within high-fidelity virtual environments. He is currently developing simulation frameworks that leverage AI to enhance the responsiveness and pedagogical efficacy of medical training systems.

Audrey is in the 1st year of her bachelor’s degree. She received the William and Ruth Witt scholarship and the State Farm Computer Science. Both recognize excellence and exceptional promise in Computer Science. She’s also secured a freshman summer internship at State Farm.

Maanvi is a graduating senior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying Computer Science. Passionate about technology's potential in sustainability and digital agriculture, she has pursued projects that use CS to solve real-world problems. As an international student, she has embraced UIUC's community through clubs, research, and pushing her comfort zone. She is a recipient of the Suhirtha Raj Scholarship and aspires to one day launch her own company at the intersection of tech and agriculture. In her free time, she enjoys writing short stories, cooking and playing mahjong. Following graduation, she will be joining Slack as a Software Engineer.

Xijia is a first year CS PhD student advised by Prof. Xiaojing Liao. At Illinois, his research focuses on LLM and agent security. He received bachelor's and master's degrees from Tsinghua university, as a recipient of the National Scholarship and the Outstanding Graduate Award.

Sherry Li is a 1st year Computer Science Ph.D. student under the advisorship of Prof. Nancy Amato. Her research focuses on robotics foundation models, task and motion planning, and embodied agentic systems. A recent recipient of the Amazon AI PhD Fellowship, Sherry also holds master's degrees from Gies College of Business, Carnegie Mellon University and Peking University. She was inducted into the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society in 2025.

Amruta is a first-year PhD student working with Prof. Hari Sundaram and Prof. Dilek Hakkani-Tur. Her research interests are in multimodal and conversational AI, specifically reasoning.  She completed her B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering and M.Tech. in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science from IIT Bombay.

Rahul is a first-year CS PhD student working with Professor Saurabh Gupta on sim-to-real transfer for robotic manipulation. He received his B.Tech from IIT Hyderabad and spent a summer at EPFL, where his work evaluating multimodal foundation models on vision tasks was published at ICLR 2026. His current research focuses on learning contact-rich manipulation policies in simulation.

Rahul is a PhD candidate working on Networked Systems. Rahul's research has been published, patented, and adopted by industry groups including Microsoft Teams, Oracle, and Clockwork. Currently, Rahul is currently working with Google to optimize their network routing.

Ikhyun is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. He has served as a Teaching Assistant for eight semesters, earning the "Excellent TA" recognition for multiple consecutive terms. His outstanding and sustained dedication to teaching recently culminated in his receipt of the prestigious "Lifetime TA Award."

Sriram is a 2nd year PhD student advised by Prof. Sarita Adve. When not working on datacenter software and hardware research, you will find him dancing, running, hiking, and generally soaking up the great outdoors!

Drishti Goel is a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science, where she works on human-centered AI safety in high-stakes domains such as caregiving and mental health at the OnCARE lab. Previously, she was a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research India, where she spent two years working on AI for large-scale cloud services, with publications at venues including ICSE (Distinguished Paper Award) and FSE. She completed her B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Dayalbagh Educational Institute, graduating with the University's Founder's Medal---awarded for overall academic excellence, leadership, and service---and as a two-time Director's Medal recipient for highest academic performance.

Madhav is an MSCS student working with Professors Ram Alagappan and Aishwarya Ganesan in the Distributed and Storage Systems Lab. His research focuses on infrastructure systems for modern AI workloads. Outside UIUC, Madhav is a contributor and maintainer for the Kubernetes project, working on control plane scalability, and a chair for GopherCon, the premier conference on the Go programming language. He is deeply passionate about translating his work into tangible social impact and works closely with NGOs like Aarti For Girls to design ways that can create economic opportunity for underprivileged women in India.

Pedro is a PhD student in Computer Science working with Professor Josep Torrellas. His research focuses on the intersection of computer architecture, distributed systems, and machine learning, working on hardware accelerators for heterogeneous datacenters. Pedro earned his master's degree at EPFL as a "La Caixa" Foundation Scholar and a double bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, graduating first in the Computer Science department at both institutions.

Ruizhong Qiu is a Ph.D. student in computer science at UIUC advised by Professor Hanghang Tong. His research interests lie broadly in theoretical foundations and methodological advances of machine learning.

Jovan Stojkovic is an incoming assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. Jovan holds a Ph.D. from UIUC. Jovan's research interests are in computer architecture and systems for cloud and datacenter computing. He holds six patents for his collaborations with Microsoft and IBM on datacenter computing. His research has been recognized with David J. Kuck Outstanding PhD Thesis Award, HPCA Best Paper Award, IEEE Micro Top Pick Honorable Mention, W. J. Poppelbaum Memorial Award, Kenichi Miura Award, and an invitation to speak at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum.

Davis is in the 5^th and final year of the BS/MS joint degree program. His research interests are in wireless sensing and machine learning systems, and he has been working with Professor Deepak Vasisht since his junior year. At University of Illinois, he has been a course assistant for CS 124H, CS 128, and CS 222. In his free time, he enjoys playing tennis, soccer, and basketball with friends.