Wei Wang, a professor and chair of the Computer Science Department at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received the Innovation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest professional computing society.
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.
