Undergraduate Consortium

Agenda

Social Event (Sunday)

2:00 PM – 7:00 PM          Visit to the Yeomiji Botanical Garden followed by dinner at Poongro, Jungmun Jeju

             The social program is financially supported by Dr. Jeff Dean. Dr. Dean, a KDD 2026 keynote speaker, is a computer science legend and the Chief Scientist for Google DeepMind and Google Research.

Poster Session (Tuesday Night)

6:00 PM – 8:00 PM          Poster Session

General Program (Wednesday)

Morning schedule (10:00 AM – 12:00 PM):
10:00 AM – 10:05 AM      Intro – 5 min
10:05 AM – 10:30 AM      Ice-Breaker Event
10:30 AM – 11:15 PM      How to Thrive in Grad School – Panel of PhD Students and Organizers
11:15 AM – 11:30 AM      Organizers’ Stories
11:30 AM – 12:00 PM      Guest Speaker: Dr. Xiangliang Zhang, University of Notre Dame – From “I’m Interested” to “I Have a Question”

Lunch with mentors (12:00 PM – 1:30 PM)

Afternoon schedule (1:30 PM – 3:30 PM):
01:30 PM – 02:00 PM      Research Rapid-Fire Challenge
02:00 PM – 02:45 PM      Group Discussion on Research Impact
02:45 PM – 03:30 PM      Preparing for a Career in Research – Panel of Academic and Industry Professionals

3:30 PM – 4:00 PM         Coffee Break
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM         KDD Panel “Beyond Scaling: What Will Define the Next Decade of AI”
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM         KDD 2026 Banquet (Location: ICC2)

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Accepted Papers

Note: All papers linked below will be displayed during Tuesday’s poster reception.

• ‘Building and Fine-Tuning a Personalized Conversational LLM from scratch’, Rami Blaik (University of Texas at Dallas)
• ‘BioMedJImpact: A Comprehensive Dataset and LLM Pipeline for AI Engagement and Scientific Impact Analysis of Biomedical Journals’, Ruiyu Wang (Emory University); Yuzhang Xie (Emory University); Xiao Hu (Emory University); Carl Yang (Emory University); Jiaying Lu (Emory University)
• ‘Train Dirty, Recover Reliably: Data-Efficient Recovery Tuning for Noise-Injected Tool Agents’, Yumin Lee (Sookmyung Women’s University); Chong-Kwon Kim (Korea Institute of Energy Technology); Yoonhyuk Choi (Sookmyung Women’s University)
• ‘Operational Data as a Microscope: Sparse-Gated Regime-Aware Experts for Interpretable Wind Power Forecasting’, Zhiqing Cui (Reading University); Jingwen Wu (Nanjing Normal University)
• ‘When Retrieval Helps: Selective Retrieval for Single-Turn Mental-Health QA’, Hyunseo Oh (Sookmyung Women’s University); Chong-Kwon Kim (Korea Institute of Energy Technology); Yoonhyuk  Choi (Sookmyung Women’s University)
• ‘STAR: Structure-Aware Adaptive Retrieval for RAG’, Yeowon Jeon (Sookmyung Women’s University); Chong-Kwon Kim (Korea Institute of Energy Technology); Yoonhyuk Choi (Sookmyung Women’s University)
• ‘GASP: Geometry-Aware Primitive-Level Diagnostics for Floater Artifacts in 3D Gaussian Splatting’, Ian Wai Si (Tsinghua University); Elaine Huang (Mission San Jose High School)
• ‘Sketch-Guided Multi-Objective Alignment for Code Language Models: Optimizing Correctness, Efficiency, and Algorithmic Reasoning’, Siqi Qiao (East China University of Science and Technology); Fangli Ying (East China University of Science and Technology); Qingchun Hu (East China University of Science and Technology); Tingxi Li (East China University of Science and Technology)
• ‘Beyond Average Oracle Gains: Split-based Bottleneck Diagnosis for Modular RAG’, Chaewon Sung (Sookmyung Women’s University); Chong-Kwon Kim (Korea Institute of Energy Technology); Yoonhyuk Choi (Sookmyung Women’s University)
• ‘DriveGazeFlow: Conditional Distribution Learning for Driver Attention with Video-Conditioned Flow Matching’, Xiran Ni (Tongji University); Zeyang Wu (Tongji University); Kaiyi  Feng (Tsinghua University Shenzhen International Graduate); Quanlin Li (Tongji University); Jincheng Hu (Loughborough University); Yuanjian Zhang (Tongji University); Bingzhao Gao (Tongji University)
• ‘Scaffold-GAT: Grounding Brain Dynamics in Neural Anatomy’, Beomjin Kim (Chungnam National University); Sungsu Lim (Chungnam National University)
• ‘DHAN: Dilated Heatmap Attention Network for Omental Metastasis Detection in CT’, seokho woo (The Catholic University of Korea); Youjin  Shin (The Catholic University of Korea); Bohyun Kim (Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, The Catholic University of Korea Department of Radiology); Hanhong Lee (Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, The Catholic University of Korea Division of Gastrointestinal Surgery, Department of Surgery, College of Medicine)
• ‘Student Transfer Prediction under Class Imbalance: Evaluation, Class Weighting, and Feature Importance’, Branson Witt (Clark University)
• ‘Schema Guardrails in the Wild: Empirically Testing Whether Structural Constraints Tame LLM Output Volatility’, Sanjeev Kamath (University of Florida)
• ‘SAGE: A Synthetic Graph Framework for Personalized Student Knowledge-State Modeling’, Manzi Fabrice Niyigaba (Dartmouth); Xuyuan Liu  (Dartmouth); Thomas Thesen (Dartmouth); Yujun Yan (Dartmouth)
• ‘Ada-Comp: A Post-Retrain Strategy with Adaptive Compensation According to User Segments in GNN Recommender Unlearning’, Eugene Jeong (DGIST); Sang-chul Lee (DGIST)
• ‘FlywayBench: A Standardized Macroecological Dataset Validated via Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks’, Xinyi Chang (Communication University of China); Zexun Jiang (Communication University of China); Hongjiang Xiao (Communication University of China)
• ‘Decomposition vs Augmentation: Isolating the Impact of Multi-Agent Architectures in Entity Resolution’, Zachary Zeng (University of Florida)
• ‘Context-Aware Hospitalization Forecasting Evaluations for Decision Support using LLMs’, Rhea Makkuni (Johns Hopkins University); Ananya Joshi (Johns Hopkins University)
• ‘Treap-Augmented Skip List for Fast Hot-Key Lookup under Skewed Workloads’, Seobum Jeong (SKKU); Simon S. Woo (SKKU)
• ‘SafeECGMatch: Calibration-Aware Joint Frequency and Time Space Semi-Supervised Learning for Open-Set ECG Classification’, Hongkyu Koh (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies); Ikbeom Jang (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)
• ‘RAPID: Layer-Wise Redundancy-Aware Pruning and Importance-Driven Merging for Efficient Vision Transformers’, Kyumin Choi (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies); Ikbeom Jang (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)
• ‘TRUSS: Template-guided Residual Uncertainty State-Space Model’, Euichan Moon (The Catholic University of Korea); Youjin Shin (The Catholic University of Korea)
• ‘VideoEduBench: Diagnostic Benchmarking of Video Agents for Long-Horizon Classroom Interaction Understanding’, Haotong Xie (Shanghai university of finance and economics)
• ‘LLM Squid Game: A Factorial Benchmark for Measuring Functional Self-Preservation Drive in Large Language Models’, Juhyeon Park (GIST); Seungpil Lee (GIST); Sundong Kim (GIST)
• ‘CrossStream-FT: Benchmarking Fault Tolerance and Zero-Shot Generalization in Multimodal Wearable Sensors’, Akshat Bakshi (Thapar Institute of engineering and technology); Jatin Bedi (Thapar Institute of engineering and technology)
• ‘LLM-Driven Performance-Space Augmentation for Meta-learning-Based Algorithm Selection’, Darren Zhu (National University of Singapore)
• ‘Data Science in Factory: Multiscale Sensor Learning for Industrial Object Activity Recognition’, Rui Feng (Wuhan University); Yize Cai (HKUST (GZ)); Zhiqing Hong (HKUST (GZ))

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Program Committee

• Adam Pazdor (University of Manitoba)
• Chuxiong Wu (George Mason University)
• Farhan Tanvir (Georgia State University)
• Krishna Ramamoorthy (Santa Clara University )
• Mahima Agumbe Suresh (San Jose State University)
• Ming Ming Tan (Augusta University)
• Olaoluwa Adigun (Florida International University)
• Panagiotis Traganitis (Michigan State University)
• Ruben Van Genugten (Institute for Experiential AI, Northeastern University)
• Sangyup Lee (Incheon National University)
• Shiva Jahangiri (Santa Clara University)
• Tathagata Mukherjee (University of Alabama Huntsville)
• Xiao Li (Santa Clara University)

Keynote Speaker

• Xiangliang Zhang (University of Notre Dame)

Academic and Industry Panelists

• Neil Shah (Director of Research, Senior Principal Scientist at Snap)
• Vagelis Papalexakis (UC Riverside)
• Sean Choi (Santa Clara University, former Research Scientist at Facebook)
• Alex Smola (CEO at Boson AI, former Marianas Labs and AWS)

PhD Student Panelists

• Yili Shen (University of Notre Dame)
• Shaan Pakala (UC Riverside)
• Firuz Juraev (Sungkyunkwan University)

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Undergraduate Consortium Chairs

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