Computer Science Professor Wei Wang Receives ACM Innovation Award
The Innovation Award is the highest technical honor presented by ACM’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD). The award, which includes a lecture and a $2,500 prize, recognizes one outstanding individual each year for contributions to knowledge discovery and data mining that have had a lasting impact on advancing theory or the development of commercial systems.
This year’s award will be presented August 10 at the KDD 2026 conference in Jeju, South Korea, where Wang will deliver the Innovation Award lecture. Wang serves as chair of SIGKDD and previously received its Service Award in 2016.
Wang’s research focuses on big data analytics, data mining, machine learning, computational biology and artificial intelligence for science. As director of the Scalable Analytics Institute at UCLA, she leads an interdisciplinary research program developing AI and data science tools to analyze large datasets.
In April, she was named the principal investigator of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-funded project titled Accelerated Formal Proof Synthesis with Neuro-Symbolic Automation, or ALPHA, which aims to develop AI tools for mathematical discovery.
Wang is also part of a multidisciplinary team developing an AI system that can reason like a mathematician. The group’s “Accelerating the Queen of Sciences” proposal received a $250,000 seed grant from the Laude Institute through its Moonshots initiative.
She holds the Leonard Kleinrock Term Chair in Computer Science at UCLA Samueli and has a joint faculty appointment in the Department of Computational Medicine, which is affiliated with the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She is a member of the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences and the Bioinformatics Interdepartmental Program.
A fellow of ACM and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Wang holds five U.S. patents and has published more than 400 research papers in international journals and major peer-reviewed conference proceedings.
Other honors Wang has received include the IBM Invention Achievement Award in 2000 and 2001, the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship in 2005, the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Outstanding Service Award in 2012 and the Okawa Foundation Research Award in 2013.