Celebrating ACM’s 2026 Regeneron ISEF Special Award Winners

ACM-W congratulates all of the recipients of the 2026 Association for Computing Machinery Special Awards at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. These students represent the next generation of computing innovators, applying computer science, artificial intelligence, robotics, software, and computational thinking to problems with real-world impact.

This year’s ACM Special Award recognized the following projects and students:

Place	Project Name	Winner’s Name(s)	Winner’s Location
1st	A Faster Algorithm for Solving Constant and Variable Delay Differential Equations via Quantum Block Encoding	Snayhin Sharma	Doylestown, PA (United States)
2nd	Keep Your Data Close, but Your Failures Closer: Failure-Driven Adversarial Self-Evolution of Language Models	Zachary Kit Chun Choy; Min Sen Tan	Singapore, Singapore
3rd	SAMA: A Self-Evolving AI Multimodal Assistant for Dementia Care	Shiqing (Ellie) Tang	Allen, TX (United States)
4th	SafeSkies: Development of an Autonomous System for Detecting and Tracking Unmanned Hot-Air Balloons and Other Aviation Hazards in High-Risk Areas Using Computer Vision	Leonardo Paschoal Bartoccini; Lara Megda Schusterschitz	Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil
4th	Decoding Light: Physics-Aware Self-Supervised AI for Low-Cost High-Fidelity Hyperspectral Imaging	Michael Junzhe Hua	Bloomfield Hills, MI (United States)
4th	Hearing Is Discovering: Audio Augmented Reality for Celestial Objects Through Music-Theoretic and Spatial Sonification	Hanna Suzuki	Bedford, MA (United States)

ACM-W would like to especially highlight and celebrate the female winners among this year’s ACM awardees: 

Their work demonstrates the creativity, technical depth, and social relevance that young women are bringing to computing research around the world. Congratulations to all of the 2026 ACM Special Award winners. ACM-W is proud to recognize these students’ achievements and to encourage them as they continue exploring, building, and leading in computing.

Q&A with Hanna Suzuki

ACM-W: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Hanna Suzuki: I am a rising junior in Bedford, Massachusetts. My coding journey started before I fully understood that I was coding. As a kindergarten student, I played with Lego WeDo and Scratch, mostly because it felt like building and storytelling at the same time. I like that coding gives me a way to connect my different interests instead of keeping them in separate boxes.These days, most of my independent projects use Python for data analytics, machine learning, algorithmic music composition, and IoT development with single-board computers and microcontrollers. At school, I co-founded our Girls Who Code chapter and now help lead it, hoping to make computer science feel more welcoming, creative, and accessible, especially for girls who are just beginning to imagine what they can create with technology. Outside computing, I have been learning piano for many years, and I am also a varsity tennis player for my school team. I think music, sports, and coding all teach me different ways to practice, solve problems, and keep improving.

ACM-W: What problem were you trying to solve, and why did it matter to you personally?
Hanna Suzuki: The problem I wanted to explore was that augmented reality (AR) is very good at helping us see the world better, but it rarely helps us hear it better. Most AR systems are designed around visual overlays, while audio is often treated as a secondary or decorative element. In astronomy, for example, many AR tools help users identify stars and constellations by overlaying labels, lines, or illustrations onto a camera view of the sky. I wanted to ask whether audio could do more than support the visual interface—whether it could encode and communicate astronomical information in its own way. That question mattered to me personally because I have been studying music for many years, so I naturally think about sound as structured, expressive, and information-rich. I wondered whether features of celestial objects could be mapped to musical parameters to “hear” celestial objects in a way that reflects their actual astronomical properties. Astronomy also felt like the right testbed because it is traditionally taught through visual representations. I wanted to explore whether audio could offer another pathway for learning, especially for people with low vision or diverse learning styles. My goal was to make audio an active learning channel in AR: not just “seeing is believing,” but also “hearing is discovering.”

ACM-W: What advice would you give to other young women or students considering computing research?
Hanna Suzuki: I would tell other students not to wait until they feel completely ready. It is easy to think that you need to know everything before starting a project, but I do not think that is true. A good project can begin with a problem or question you care about, even if the idea is still messy. Do not be discouraged when your project feels confusing. There will be walls, dead ends, broken code, unexpected results, and moments when it is hard to see the next step. I have learned that research often becomes clearer and exciting again only after you keep working through the difficult parts piece by piece. One of my inspirations in astronomical sonification research, Dr. Wanda Diaz-Merced, has advised young people to remember that outstanding people do not become great overnight; they have to stay focused on their mission. That idea has stayed with me. I also think it helps to find supportive people, such as teachers, mentors, friends, and communities, who make it feel safe to ask questions, share ideas, and seek help. In my own project, I planned a user study with human participants to evaluate my sonification algorithm. My official goal was 50 participants, although I wondered whether even 30 would be realistic. I simply did not know how many people would be willing to participate. To my surprise, I ended up with 116 participants thanks to my supportive teachers and classmates! Many participants helped me connect with additional people, including an astrophotographer, astrophysicists, and music theory professors. This experience taught me that computing research can seem intimidating from the outside, but it becomes much more welcoming when you find people who are willing to listen, advise, test, encourage, and open doors. The excitement of starting a new project is wonderful, but it may not last long. What matters after that is consistency. So, my biggest advice is to choose a project topic that makes you curious enough to keep returning to it. If you keep going, ask for help, and improve the project piece by piece, your idea can slowly become something real.

ACM-W: What are the next steps for you and/or this project?
Hanna Suzuki: For this project, I would like to continue improving the sonification algorithm to make the musical mappings more adaptive, so different types of celestial objects can have more distinctive and meaningful sound profiles. I would also like to expand the user study with more questions and comparison groups. I hope to run the next round of the study to carry out more thorough evaluations of an updated sonification algorithm.  Besides the ISEF project, I am trying to design a probabilistic metric that can summarize a player’s overall tennis performance as a predictive measure. This brings me back to why I enjoy coding: it lets me connect my different interests instead of keeping them in separate boxes. Astronomical sonification and tennis statistics may sound very different, but both let me use computing to explore patterns, ask questions, and make complex information more understandable.

ACM-W: Congratulations once again to Hanna for her achievements!

Connect with Hanna in LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanna-suzuki-/

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