The first phase of the Region 8 Student Paper Contest 2025, the 58th edition of this prestigious and long-standing competition, has concluded. This year, we received approximately 40 submissions, of which 34 were deemed valid.
TOP 5 PAPERS – SPC 2025 FINALISTS
(alphabetically by authors’ first names)
| Place | Name of the first author | Name(s) of the co-author(s) | University | Section (Country) | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1-5 | Achref Benammar | / | Institut national des sciences appliquées et de technologie – INSAT | Tunisia | A Computational Approach to Modeling Conversational Systems: Analyzing Large-Scale Quasi-Patterned Dialogue Flows |
| 1-5 | Arman Nikraftar Khiabani | / | Catholic University of Louvain | Belgium | Deep Reinforcement Learning for the Expert-Advice Multi-Armed Bandit |
| 1-5 | Emilija Chona | / | Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje | North Macedonia | Transformer-Driven Dynamic Resource Reconfiguration in Cellular Networks |
| 1-5 | Klemen Berkovič | Borko Bošković, Janez Brest | University of Maribor | Slovenia | Cooperative Coevolution Framework with Recursive Differential Grouping Algorithms for Solving Large-Scale Optimization Problems |
| 1-5 | Zeyang Ai | Yiming Zhou | Imperial College London | UK & Ireland (UK) | Interpretable Learning via Proximal Optimization |
The SPC 2025 international jury, composed of Prof. Gianfranco Chicco (Italy), Prof. Joao Carlos Ferreira (Portugal), Prof. Krzysztof Gorecki (Poland), and Prof. Vera Markovic (Serbia), has anonymously selected the following five papers (listed alphabetically by the authors’ first names) for the Regional Oral Finals.
The SPC 2025 Oral Finals will be held as part of the R8 flagship conference, EUROCON 2025, from June 4–6, 2025, in Gdynia, Poland. The top three finalists will receive awards of $800, $500, and $200 for first, second, and third place, respectively. Additionally, the Student Branch of the first-place paper will be awarded $250.
The IEEE R8 Student Activities Committee congratulates the authors of the top five papers and the IEEE Student Branches of the finalists!
Papers ranked from 6th to 10th place
| Place | Name of the first author | Name(s) of the co-author(s) | University | Section (Country) | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | Václav Pavlíček | / | Imperial College London | UK & Ireland (UK) | Unlimited Sampling of Sparse Signals: Beyond Fourier Domain and Bandlimited Kernels |
| 7 | Bastien Baluyot | Marta Varela, Chen Qin | Imperial College London | UK & Ireland (UK) | Spectral Bias Correction in PINNs for Myocardial Image Registration of Pathological Data |
| 8 | Eva Urankar | / | University of Ljubljana | Slovenia | Waste Detection on Mobile Devices: Model Performance and Efficiency Comparison |
| 9 | Mohammad Zbeeb | Mariam Salman, Mohamad Bazzi | American University of Beirut | Lebanon | Optimizing Deep Neural Networks using Safety-Guided Self Compression |
| 10 | Giovanni Ferrannini | Dario Di Gregorio, Federico Fissore | Politecnico di Torino | Italy | Mapping Game Theory to Quantum Systems: Nash Equilibria via Neutral Atom Computing |
Given the high number of submissions, we also extend our congratulations to those who narrowly missed the top spots. We deeply appreciate the dedication of these participants, whose work came close to the threshold of selection. As a gesture of recognition, we are pleased to share a list of papers ranked 6th through 10th.
According to the SPC Rules, authors ranked 6th to 10th place will not proceed further in the contest. However, they will receive certificates recognizing their commendable achievements.
Finally, we extend our gratitude to all 34 participants of SPC 2025! The majority of the submitted papers demonstrate high quality, and we wholeheartedly encourage all authors to continue their research efforts.
