The 2002 IEEE Region 8 Student Paper Contest received 16 papers from 14 Student Branches in 10 countries:

• Belgium, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve
• Hungary, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
• Iran, University of Tehran (3 papers)
• Iran, Institute for studies in theoretical Physics and Mathematics, School of Intelligent Systems, and Azad University, Tehran
• Malta, University of Malta
• Netherlands, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
• Netherlands, University of Twente, Enschede
• Nigeria, Federal University of Technology, Owerri
• Slovenia, University of Ljubljana
• Slovenia, University of Maribor
• South Africa, University of Pretoria
• Spain, Escuela Politecnica Superior, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
• Spain, Escuela Superior de Ingenieros de Telecomunicacion de Madrid, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid
• Yugoslavia, University of Belgrado

The oral finals took place in Cairo, Egypt, on 8 May 2002, as part of MELECON 2002, the 11th Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (7-9 May 2002).

The three winners were:

1. Hans B. Roelofs and Jeroen A.J. Thijs (University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands) Performance and cellular capacity of M-ary PSK in co-channel interference: roelofs
2. Matej Artac (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia) Mobile robot localisation with incremental PCA: artac
3. Saurabh Sinha (University of Pretoria, South Africa) Design of an integrated CMOS PLL frequency synthesizer: sinha

The other three papers selected for the oral finals were:

• Víctor P. Gil Jimenez (Escuela Politecnica Superior, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain) Study and implementation of complimentary Golay sequences for PAR reduction in OFDM signals: gil
• Gael Rouvroy and Francois-Xavier Standaert (Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) FPGA’s as cryptanalytic tools: rouvroy
• José Maria Nadal Serrano (Escuela Superior de Ingenieros de Telecomunicación de Madrid, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain) 5×4 Gbps 0.35 micron CMOS CRC generator designed with standard cells: nadal

The five jury members were:

•     Buyurman Baykal, Baskent, Turkey
•     Christian Borgert, Germany
•     Kamel Hassan, Cairo, Egypt
•     Javier Macías-Guarasa, Madrid, Spain
•     Kurt Richter, Graz, Austria

and the whole event was coordinated by Martin Bastiaans, Eindhoven, Netherlands, IEEE R8 SPC coordinator.