CSUSB student earns third place at ACM Student Research Competition

Lusine Hayrapetyan, a computer science major at Cal State San Bernardino recently took part in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Research Competition at the 2026 ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Symposium.

Competing in the undergraduate division, Hayrapetyan came in third, earning herself a monetary prize, award medal and a one-year complimentary ACM student membership.

Hayrapetyan’s award-winning project, “Label-Free Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation in a University Policy Chatbot,” was selected through a competitive, multi-round process that included a research paper submission, poster presentation and formal presentation before ACM judges.

Hayrapetyan’s work introduces a multi-dimensional, automated evaluation framework designed to determine whether AI-generated responses truly reflect user intent and are supported by relevant evidence. Her research focuses on retrieval-augmented generation systems — AI models that combine document retrieval with large language models — and explores how these systems can be evaluated without relying on manually labeled data.

She applied this approach to a chatbot designed to answer questions about CSUSB’s university policies, a complex and high-stakes task that requires precise interpretation and domain-specific input from faculty, staff and students. This setting provided an ideal test case for evaluating the reliability and trustworthiness of AI-driven systems.

The ACM student research competition is recognized as one of the top international undergraduate research competitions in computer science.