Five CS students named 2025 Siebel Scholars

On Sept. 20, the Siebel Scholars Foundation announced the 2025 Siebel Scholars Award recipients. Five Illinois Grainger College of Engineering students were named to this year's class in the Graduate Schools of Computer Science category. The 2025 group of 78 honorees join past Siebel Scholars classes in a network of more than 1,900 scholars, researchers, and entrepreneurs.

Tanay Dixit is an MS student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where professor Jiawei Han advises him. He completed his bachelor’s degree at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. During his undergraduate studies, Tanay was awarded the prestigious NSF REU and DAAD scholarships, which enabled him to pursue research internships during the summer. He also represented IIT Madras twice at the Inter IIT Tech Meets and won gold and bronze medals. His research interests mainly lie in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP), focusing on developing reliable and robust NLP systems that can be effectively applied in real-world scenarios. His research has been published at conferences such as ACL 2023, EMNLP 2022, and EMNLP 2021. In addition to this, he has gained valuable experience in applied research through internships at Microsoft Research and Adobe.

Hao-Yu (Max) Hsu is a first-year MS student in computer science at Illinois. Previously, he was a research assistant at National Taiwan University (NTU) and graduated summa cum laude in electrical engineering from National Tsing Hua University, ranking first out of 102 students.

Max’s research focuses on 3D vision, including 3D scene reconstruction, point cloud processing, and physics-based rendering and simulation. At NTU, he worked on efficient reconstruction and rendering of indoor scenes and object-level partial point cloud completion. Both were accepted by CVPR and NeurIPS, two top-tier vision and AI conferences.

At Illinois, he focuses on physics-informed 3D vision, working with professor Shenlong Wang on developing a physically realistic video editing system. Besides academics, Max worked as a software intern at ITRI, building OCR pipelines. He also led a team to win an honorable mention award in a national game design competition.

Baoyu Li is a first-year MS student in computer science advised by professor Kris Hauser. She attained dual bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics with magna cum laude honors from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Baoyu’s research interests lie in the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, specifically focusing on developing structured world models for robotic manipulation of deformable objects. Her studies aim to enhance robots’ understanding and physical interactions within unstructured environments. Her graduate work has been published in RSS2024 and won the Best Paper Award at the ICRA 2024 Workshop on Representing and Manipulating Deformable Objects. Besides, she had publications at ACL2023 and ICRAW2023 on graph learning and meta-learning for robotics. Beyond her research, Baoyu has served as a TA/CA at Illinois and as a teaching volunteer in Champaign, Guangxi, and Galle.

Ashutosh Sharma is a graduate student at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science pursuing a master’s degree. He graduated from IIT Bombay in 2023 with a bachelor of technology in mechanical engineering, with honors and dual minors in computer science and artificial intelligence. Ashutosh has been recognized with the prestigious KVPY Fellowship and Kulapati K. M. Munshi Award. His research focuses on trustworthy ML and ML for social good. At Illinois, he has worked on the adversarial robustness of LLMs, heterogeneous differential privacy, and out-of-distribution detection for temporal data.

He worked on medical image translation and neural information retrieval for low-resource languages during his undergraduate studies. His research aims to benefit society, especially marginalized communities, and his work has been published in leading ML conferences. Ashutosh has also shown a solid commitment to community service, mentorship, and professional excellence, with notable experiences at Wells Fargo and Amazon. 

Alan Wang is a BS/MS computer science student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working with ECE professor Christopher Fletcher in hardware security. Currently, Alan’s primary focus is side-channel attacks and defenses. On the side, he also researches operating systems with professor Tianyin Xu. Alan is a software developer intern at Jane Street and has worked as a computer science intern at D.E. Shaw Research. As an underclassman, he worked on autonomous biology wet labs for two years at Argonne National Laboratory. In high school, he worked with the Navy on autonomous bomb-defusing robotics.

Outside of academics, Alan is an ACM mentor and helps incoming students transition to college. He was also the swim coordinator for two years at the Illinois Triathlon Club, leading all water-related activities and swim lessons.

Now in its 24^th year, the Siebel Scholars program annually recognizes nearly 80 exceptional students from the world’s leading graduate schools of business, computer science, and bioengineering. The program awards grants to 16 universities in the United States, China, France, Italy and Japan. Following a competitive review process by the deans of their respective schools based on outstanding academic achievement and demonstrated leadership, the top graduate students from 27 partner programs are selected each year as Siebel Scholars and receive a $35,000 award for their final year of studies. 

Grainger Engineering Affiliations

Jiawei Han is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of Computer Science and is affiliated with the Siebel School of  Computing and Data Science. Jiawei Han holds the Michael Aiken Chair.

Shenlong Wang is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of Computer Science and is affiliated with the Siebel School of  Computing and Data Science and the IMMERSE: Center for Immersive Computing .

Kris K. Hauser is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of Computer Science and is affiliated with the Siebel School of  Computing and Data Science,  the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering.

Christopher Fletcher is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of Computer Science and is affiliated with the Siebel School of  Computing and Data Science and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. 

Tianyin Xu is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of Computer Science and is affiliated with the Siebel School of  Computing and Data Science and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.