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Hybrid Learning for Recommendation: From Contrastive Alignment to Language-Model Fusion

Recommender systems have largely relied on collaborative filtering, which maps users and items to compact latent vectors and ranks by their dot product. This makes large-scale ranking fast, but interaction data records only that a preference was expressed, never why, and is often sparse. User reviews and pre-trained language models can supply the missing semantics, yet existing methods either treat reviews as input features, underserving entities with few reviews, or place a language model in the inference path at a per-query cost that does not scale. This dissertation brings semantic understanding into collaborative recommendation while preserving efficient retrieval. First, a review-centric contrastive alignment framework moves reviews from the input pipeline into the training objective. Second, a large language model extends this framework by constructing contrastive views offline. Third, a fusion framework jointly trains user and item ID-token embeddings with masked identifier modeling through a frozen l… Subtitle: PhD Dissertation Defense by DONG Viet Hoang. Contact: scisseminars@smu.edu.sg. Speaker Details: , DONG Viet Hoang PhD Candidate School of Computing and Information Systems Singapore Management University, I received my B.Sc. in Computer Science (Honors Program) from the University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. My research interests include recommender systems, contrastive learning, and large language models for recommendation; in particular, I integrate user reviews and language models into collaborative filtering to build recommender systems that are both… RSVP: . Reserve a seat: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=ynmKyZpakUeiQ_Bq_WdGTejbEKPlArBJhZomj91naG9UN1o3QjlRMlI1VzkxQUpWQ1JHVkhLRkpFMy4u. Type: Seminars & Workshops. Subject: Information Technology & Systems. Audience: Public. Current Student. Academic Community. Tuesday, November 3, 2026, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM. Meeting room 5.1, Level 5. SMU SCIS 1, Singapore 178902. For more info visit computing.smu.edu.sg.

Climate Transition Stress Testing for Corporate Credit Risk

Infosessions Subtitle: SCIS EngD 2026 Pre-conference talk by NGUYEN Huynh Long Hung. RSVP: . Event Details: , Abstract This talk presents a transparent data-mining approach for connecting corporate financial information with ESG risk measures to support climate-transition stress testing. The framework separates two tasks: assessing a firm’s underlying financial distress and examining how an externally imposed transition-risk scenario could affect that assessment. This separation makes the assumptions behind the stress test visible, auditable, and replaceable. Using U.S. corporate financial and ESG data, the… Type: Seminars & Workshops. Subject: Information Technology & Systems. Audience: Prospective Student. Current Student. Alumni. Academic Community. SMU Faculty & Staff. Incoming Students. Wednesday, November 4, 2026, 1:00 PM – 1:30 PM.

GuidedRec: Behaviourally Constrained Portfolio Recommendation with Certified Slate Optimisation

inancial asset recommendations must balance what an investor is likely to accept against how an asset affects their portfolio. A stock that matches an investor’s preferences can increase risk, while a valuable diversifier may be behaviourally implausible. We introduce GuidedRec, a holdings-aware framework that first identifies eligible, currently unheld stocks through a behavioural gate calibrated using only past data. It then jointly chooses a fixed number of additions to maximise each investor’s risk-adjusted utility for the resulting equally weighted portfolio, accounting for interactions among new and existing holdings.  We show that when the estimated covariance matrix has a factor-plus-isotropic structure, its isotropic component does not affect which fixed-size slate is optimal. This enables a compact factor-based formulation and rigorous search bounds. Our Ledoit–Wolf covariance estimator satisfies this condition exactly. GuidedRec uses a branch-and-bound solver that either proves global optimality o… Subtitle: Pre-Conference Talk by YOUNG Ezekiel Ong. Contact: scisseminar@smu.edu.sg. Speaker Details: , YOUNG Ezekiel Ong PhD Candidate School of Computing and Information Systems Singapore Management University, Ezekiel YOUNG is a PhD candidate at the School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, supervised by Prof. Hady W. Lauw. His research focuses on the intersection of economics and computation, with applications to product bundling, competitive markets, and portfolio recommendation. RSVP: . Reserve a seat: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=ynmKyZpakUeiQ_Bq_WdGTejbEKPlArBJhZomj91naG9URFhQSlFLVUREMjI4QjNMNklHT0tEQzRIVS4u. Type: Seminars & Workshops. Subject: Information Technology & Systems. Audience: Public. Wednesday, November 4, 2026, 2:30 PM – 2:45 PM. Meeting room 4.4, Level 4. SMU SCIS, Singapore 178902. For more info visit computing.smu.edu.sg.

SMU: Taipei Coffee Session

Public Events RSVP: . Reserve a seat: https://calendly.com/ivysim-smu/tpcs041126. Event Details: Join us for an insightful session to ​​discover ​​how ​​our post-graduate programmes ​​can support your personal and professional aspirations. ​​ Our Admissions Advisors will speak with you directly to provide detailed guidance on the application process and to discuss the financial aid and scholarship opportunities that may be available to you. For a pre-application assessment, please bring along a copy of your resume for a personalised review. Kindly note that sessions may be conducted in a group se… Type: Information Sessions. Subject: Accounting. Business. Law. Social Sciences & Humanities. Economics. Audience: Public. Wednesday, November 4, 2026, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM. Location will be sent to confirmed attendees.

Utility-Aware Behavioral Data Mining for Markets and Recommender Systems

Behavioral data reveal preferences and choices, but prediction alone cannot identify decisions best serving a specified objective. This dissertation investigates utility-aware behavioral data mining for markets and recommender systems, linking behavioral evidence to seller revenue and profit in bundling and investor portfolio utility in financial recommendation. The first study introduces the Integrated Price Mining Method (IPMM) for joint pricing of a predefined, potentially overlapping bundle catalog. Consumers may purchase multiple non-overlapping bundles. Modeling selection as weighted set packing and exploiting overlap dependencies, IPMM approximates revenue maximization. Evaluations show revenues near exact benchmarks on small instances and gains over baselines on larger ones. The second study examines bundle construction and pricing by two competing firms with asymmetric inventories and heterogeneous costs. CoRe Bundling constructs differentiated offers using matching and rival-aware pricing; Strateg… Subtitle: PhD Dissertation Proposal by YOUNG Ezekiel Ong. Contact: scisseminars@smu.edu.sg. Speaker Details: , YOUNG Ezekiel Ong PhD Candidate School of Computing and Information Systems Singapore Management University, Ezekiel YOUNG is a PhD candidate at the School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, under the supervision of Prof. Hady W. Lauw. His research focuses on the intersection of economics and computation, with applications to product bundling, competitive markets, and portfolio recommendation. RSVP: . Reserve a seat: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=ynmKyZpakUeiQ_Bq_WdGTejbEKPlArBJhZomj91naG9UNU8wRzlHWlUzRVJEQlk4N1A1VzdVUjlHMi4u. Type: Seminars & Workshops. Subject: Information Technology & Systems. Audience: Public. Current Student. Academic Community. Thursday, November 5, 2026, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM. Meeting room 5.1, Level 5. SMU SCIS 1, Singapore 178902. For more info visit computing.smu.edu.sg.

Towards Dynamic Security Engineering for Cyber-Physical Systems

Infosessions Subtitle: SCIS EngD 2026 Final Dissertation by HUANG Shao Fei. RSVP: . Event Details: , Abstract Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) underpin critical infrastructure, transportation, and industrial operations, yet their extended life cycles, evolving threat landscapes, and safety-critical demands make them difficult to secure using traditional, static security engineering approaches. This dissertation argues that CPS security demands a dynamic security engineering paradigm: one that continuously updates threat-informed models, incorporates operational evidence, and supports adaptive decision-maki… Type: Seminars & Workshops. Subject: Information Technology & Systems. Audience: Prospective Student. Current Student. Alumni. Academic Community. SMU Faculty & Staff. Incoming Students. Thursday, November 5, 2026, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.

SMU: Bangkok Coffee Session

Public Events RSVP: . Reserve a seat: https://calendly.com/danielpang-smu/smu-bkk-nov2026. Event Details: Join us for an insightful session to ​​discover ​​how ​​our post-graduate programmes ​​can support your personal and professional aspirations. ​​ Our Admissions Advisors will speak with you directly to provide detailed guidance on the application process and to discuss the financial aid and scholarship opportunities that may be available to you. For a pre-application assessment, please bring along a copy of your resume for a personalised review. Kindly note that sessions may be conducted in a group se… Type: Information Sessions. Subject: Accounting. Business. Law. Social Sciences & Humanities. Economics. Audience: Public. Monday, November 9, 2026, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM. Terminal 21 Asok, Bangkok.

Grounding Foundation Models with Local Context for Societal Impact

Foundation models are remarkably capable but fundamentally lack local context, which are the domain-specific, community-specific, and structurally rich knowledge required by real-world applications. In this talk, I will discuss our work on bridging this gap through knowledge graphs, retrieval-grounded architectures, and domain-aware reasoning. I will show how these approaches enable deployed tools for wildlife conservation research, navigation of Colombia's Truth Commission archives, and personalized nutritional reasoning; the very settings where generic model knowledge falls short and local context is everything. I will close with reflections on what it takes to move from innovative methods to tools that practitioners actually use. Subtitle: Research Seminar by Nitesh CHAWLA. Contact: scisseminars@smu.edu.sg. Speaker Details: , Nitesh CHAWLA Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science & Engineering University of Notre Dame, Nitesh CHAWLA is the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and the Lucy Family Director for Data & AI Academic Strategy, leading the Data, AI, and Computing Initiative at the University of Notre Dame. His research is focused on artificial intelligence, data science, and network science, and is motivated by the question of how technology can advance the common good through… RSVP: . Reserve a seat: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=ynmKyZpakUeiQ_Bq_WdGTbOXO7ktpRtBsn62WuekYtpUMzUzQTU4UDJXQTRHSDFNSVI1WDJCWklGSC4u&route=shorturl. Type: Seminars & Workshops. Subject: Information Technology & Systems. Audience: Public. Current Student. Academic Community. Friday, November 13, 2026, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM. Seminar Room 3-4, Level 3. SMU SCIS 1, Singapore 178902. For more info visit computing.smu.edu.sg.

SMU: Jakarta Coffee Session

Public Events RSVP: . Reserve a seat: https://calendly.com/ivysim-smu/20261113jktcs. Event Details: Join us for an insightful session to ​​discover ​​how ​​our post-graduate programmes ​​can support your personal and professional aspirations. ​​ Our Admissions Advisors will speak with you directly to provide detailed guidance on the application process and to discuss the financial aid and scholarship opportunities that may be available to you. For a pre-application assessment, please bring along a copy of your resume for a personalised review. Kindly note that sessions may be conducted in a group se… Type: Information Sessions. Subject: Accounting. Business. Law. Social Sciences & Humanities. Economics. Audience: Public. Friday, November 13, 2026, 7:30 PM – 9:30 PM. Location will be sent to confirmed attendees.

From Suspicious Nodes to Multi-Agent Failures: Learning to Detect, Generalize, and Diagnose Unusual Behaviors

Detecting unusual behavior is essential for safeguarding interconnected systems, from social and financial networks to large language model (LLM)–based multi-agent systems. This thesis addresses limited anomaly supervision, generalization across graph domains, and failure diagnosis through four complementary studies. First, TAM enables unsupervised graph anomaly detection by modeling one-class homophily and exploiting the structural and contextual consistency of normal nodes without requiring labels. Second, GGAD addresses semi-supervised detection by generating informative pseudo-anomalies and combining anomaly-aware representation learning with a one-class objective, effectively using limited normal labels. Third, AnomalyGFM supports zero-shot and few-shot graph anomaly detection through residual representations, normality and abnormality prototypes, and localized subgraph inference. It transfers patterns learned from a source graph to unseen target graphs with no or limited target labels. Finally, Verif… Subtitle: PhD Dissertation Defense by QIAO Hezhe. Contact: scisseminars@smu.edu.sg. Speaker Details: , QIAO Hezhe PhD Candidate School of Computing and Information Systems Singapore Management University, Hezhe QIAO is a final-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at Singapore Management University, supervised by Professor Guansong Pang. His research focuses on trustworthy and generalizable AI, particularly graph anomaly detection, foundation models, and the reliability of LLM-based multi-agent systems. His related work has been published at leading venues, including NeurIPS x4, ICML x2, KDD x2, IJCAI,… RSVP: . Reserve a seat: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=ynmKyZpakUeiQ_Bq_WdGTejbEKPlArBJhZomj91naG9UQldDUEE1UU5CQVgxWE1BTVZRU05BQlpGNy4u. Type: Seminars & Workshops. Subject: Information Technology & Systems. Audience: Public. Current Student. Academic Community. Monday, November 16, 2026, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM. Meeting room 4.4, Level 4. SMU SCIS 1, Singapore 178902. For more info visit computing.smu.edu.sg.

SMU: Surabaya Coffee Session

Public Events RSVP: . Reserve a seat: https://calendly.com/chrisng-fstn/smuccsurabayanov26. Event Details: Join us for an insightful session to ​​discover ​​how ​​our post-graduate programmes ​​can support your personal and professional aspirations. ​​ Our Admissions Advisors will speak with you directly to provide detailed guidance on the application process and to discuss the financial aid and scholarship opportunities that may be available to you. For a pre-application assessment, please bring along a copy of your resume for a personalised review. Kindly note that sessions may be conducted in a group se… Type: Information Sessions. Subject: Accounting. Business. Law. Social Sciences & Humanities. Economics. Audience: Public. Monday, November 16, 2026, 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM. Location will be sent to confirmed attendees.

Should we balance? A preliminary study into the maintainability of formal specifications as Linux kernel source code evolves

Today there is a renewed interest in formal verification of software, in part to thoroughly check that AI-generated code does what it was intended to do, and in part in recognition that critical code bases are becoming increasingly complex and a better understanding of their behavior is needed.  Still, verifying a single code instance is not sufficient.  It is also necessary to ensure that the code remains verifiable as it evolves. In this talk, we consider the latter problem in the context of a function used in the Linux kernel task scheduler.  We find that simple changes in the code require only minor adjustments to the specifications and the verification process.  More complex changes, however, can trigger situations that challenge the underlying SMT solvers used to make verification tractable.  But we find that code inducing such challenging situations may also harbor bugs. The talk is based on the joint work with Keisuke Nishimura and Jean-Pierre Lozi presented at SAS 2024. Subtitle: Research Seminar by Dr. Julia LAWALL. Contact: scisseminars@smu.edu.sg. Speaker Details: , Julia LAWALL Senior Research Scientist National Research Institute for Digital Science and Technology, Julia LAWALL received the Ph.D. degree in 1994 from the Indiana University. She has been a senior research scientist at Inria since 2011 and head of the Whisper team since 2021. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen. Her research interests are in the area of improving the quality of infrastructure software, using a variety of approaches including program analysis,… RSVP: . Reserve a seat: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=ynmKyZpakUeiQ_Bq_WdGTZjdnq9jGdxNu5Yl7qPLUetUQk84RFRZR1I5TlZFMDNGNFNCT1JDVVFPTi4u&route=shorturl. Type: Seminars & Workshops. Subject: Information Technology & Systems. Audience: Public. Current Student. Academic Community. Monday, November 23, 2026, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM. Meeting Room 4-4, Level 4. SMU SCIS 1, Singapore 178902. For more info visit computing.smu.edu.sg.

Formal models are magic

In this work, we investigate a variant of the Four Glasses Puzzle (FGP) through the lens of formal verification. Although the puzzle appears to be unsolvable at first glance, formal verification enables the discovery of a correct solution. We demonstrate how the model can be constructed and reduced through progressive abstractions, ultimately yielding a concise and comprehensible model that captures all possible puzzle configurations. To ensure computational efficiency, we introduce the Escape Game - an algorithmic construction that eliminates redundant cycles and facilitates strategy synthesis under imperfect information. Finally, by analysing the strategic capabilities of the player, we present a solution to the puzzle. The approach is formally defined and proven correct. Subtitle: Research Seminar by Laure PETRUCCI. Contact: scisseminars@smu.edu.sg. Speaker Details: , Laure PETRUCCI Professor University Paris 13, Laure PETRUCCI obtained her PhD in Computer Science from University Paris 6 in 1991. She then became associate professor in Evry. In 2003, she obtained a Full Professor position at University Paris 13. Her research takes place in the SAFER team of the LIPN laboratory. Her area of expertise is formal specification and verification of concurrent systems so as to guarantee their appropriate behaviour, using automata or Petri nets models, as well as parametric… RSVP: . Reserve a seat: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=ynmKyZpakUeiQ_Bq_WdGTejbEKPlArBJhZomj91naG9UNEM0WUdOVUZRV085NUpHSzZIQldGTjhLOS4u. Type: Seminars & Workshops. Subject: Information Technology & Systems. Audience: Public. Current Student. Academic Community. Tuesday, December 1, 2026, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM. Meeting Room 4-4 Level 4. SMU SCIS 1, Singapore 178902. For more info visit computing.smu.edu.sg.

The 12th International Symposium on Dependable Software Engineering Theories, Tools and Applications (SETTA 2026)

SETTA 2026 aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in dependable software engineering to advance theories, methods, tools, and practical applications for trustworthy software-intensive systems. The conference will facilitate exchange across formal methods, verification and validation, software testing, program analysis, and emerging AI-enabled systems; promote collaborations between academia and industry; and provide opportunities for early-career researchers and students to engage with international experts. RSVP: . Reserve a seat: https://www.setta2026.sg/home/registration. Type: Conferences & Symposiums. Subject: Information Technology & Systems. Audience: Public. Academic Community. Current Student. Wednesday, December 2, 2026 – Friday, December 4, 2026. SMU School of Economics/School of Computing & Information Systems 2, Level 4, 90 Stamford Road, Singapore 178903. For more info visit www.setta2026.sg.