What Are the Latest News and Achievements from the Polo Club of Data Science?

Updated

The Polo Club of Data Science at Georgia Tech publishes its news as a running timeline of paper acceptances, awards, talks, and graduations. As of the site's latest entries, the most recent items run from April 2026 through December 2026, covering NeurIPS, EMNLP, BMVC, and IEEE VIS acceptances, two named awards, a policy roundtable, and a CVPR workshop keynote. Below is what each entry says, grouped by type.

Paper acceptances

Date Paper / project Venue Member credited
Dec 2026 Flow Reasoning Models NeurIPS'26 DiffuLM Workshop Alec
Dec 2026 Time Conditioning Optional for Flow Matching NeurIPS'26 Alec
Aug 2026 RECAP (RL post-training for reasoning models) EMNLP'26 Main Conference Anthony
Aug 2026 ComplicitSplat BMVC Main Conference Matthew

The site also lists several projects without a dated news entry, each tied to a venue or collaborator: UNIPO (visualizing how GRPO, DAPO, and other RL algorithms fine-tune LLMs token by token), Flow Reasoning Models (turning flows into efficient recurrent reasoners, with IBM), "What Time Is It?" on time conditioning for flow matching (IBM, NeurIPS'26), RECAP (Meta, IBM, EMNLP'26 Main), and UMAP kNN Graph (dimensionality reduction through network science, deployed at Apple, TopoInVis@VIS'26).

Awards and honors

  • IEEE VIS'26 Best Short Paper, Honorable Mention — Aeree's UNIPO.
  • CoC Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award (Apr 2026) — Austin.
  • Donald V. Jackson Fellowship for outstanding first-year MS students (Apr 2026) — Grace and Sri.
  • Seongmin defended her CS PhD thesis (May 2026).

Talks, policy, and outreach

  • Atlantic Council roundtable on identity security and national resilience (Oct 2026) — Polo was an invited participant.
  • CVPR'26 SPAR-3D Workshop keynote (Jun 2026) — Polo spoke on "Realistic Simulation as a Lens into Computer Vision Vulnerabilities."

How to read this list

Two things are worth noting if you are tracking the lab's output rather than just skimming headlines.

First, the news items and the project cards are not the same set. A project can appear on the research pages with a venue and collaborators before or without a dated news entry — RECAP, for example, shows up both as an August 2026 news item and as a project card crediting Meta and IBM. If you want the full publication picture, read both.

Second, the timeline is the lab's own announcement channel, so it reflects acceptances and awards as the members choose to post them, not a complete publication record. For a paper's actual status, the venue's proceedings are the checkable source.

Where to look next

The site's "More news ›" link leads to the full news archive, and the member and alumni listings sit alongside it if you want to connect a name in the news to a current member or graduate. The research thrusts named on the site — human-centered AI, large network visualization, scalable graph mining, and cybersecurity and fraud — are the categories these announcements fall under, so browsing by thrust is the fastest way to see whether a given paper belongs to the lab's ongoing lines of work.