Undergraduate Researcher Earns National Recognition and Top-Tier Conference Acceptance

We happily celebrate the outstanding achievements of Manish Acharya, an undergraduate intern in the Simulation, Optimization, and Learning (SOL) Laboratory. Manish has been awarded the SyBBURE Best Paper Award for 2025, a prestigious honor recognizing exceptional undergraduate research conducted across the SyBBURE network.

His award-winning paper, “Efficient Sliced Wasserstein Distance Computation via Adaptive Bayesian Optimization,” was also recently accepted in extended form to ICLR 2026 (International Conference on Learning Representations), one of the world’s premier machine learning conferences and consistently ranked among the top academic venues. Manish and David Hyde will travel to Brazil in April 2026 to present their work on an international stage.

In addition to these remarkable accomplishments, Manish is continuing his research momentum with a new project in the SOL Laboratory focused on graph algorithms for physics-based simulation and animation, further expanding the lab’s impact across learning, optimization, and computational modeling. He was also recently recognized with an Honorable Mention for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award.

We congratulate Manish on these extraordinary achievements and are proud to celebrate his contributions to the department’s growing research excellence.