1st PHASE SELECTION REPORT

For the 2021 edition of the Region 8 Student Paper Contest (SPC) we received 9 papers coming from 7 countries (Belgium, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovenia, and UAE), from the following Student Branches:

1. Faculty of Electronic Engineering, University of Niš, Serbia  
2. Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
3. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor, Slovenia
4. Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
5. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, Serbia
6. University of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
7. Al-Balqa Applied University, Amman, Jordan
8. Ecole Mohammadia d’Ingenieurs, Rabat, Morocco
9. Rochester Institute of Technology, Dubai, UAE

This year, the members of the SPC international jury are:

• Professor Paul Micallef from Malta,
• Professor Giambattista Gruosso from Italy,
• Professor Mike Hinchey from the UK, 
• Professor Vera Markovic from Serbia, who is also the SPC Coordinator

The jury has anonymously selected the following five papers (listed in alphabetical order) for the Regional Oral Finals, which will be held within the frame of an IEEE conference: 

• Eva Boneš, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, “Automatic segmentation of the Golgi apparatus in volumetric data with approximate labels”
• Olivier Leblanc, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, “An affordable pedagogical setup for wave-particule duality and applications to chaotic stadium cavity”
• Predrag Aleksov, Damjan Denić, Igor Vučković, Faculty of Electronic Engineering, University of Niš, Serbia, “Object recognition with machine learning for people with visual impairment”
• Salma Moufid, Chaimae El Ainzroudi, Fatima Zahra Lachgar, Anass Ait Ben El Arbi,  Ecole Mohammadia d’Ingenieurs, Rabat, Morocco, “Improving Steganography using Image Compression JPEG”
• Yazan Alnajjar, Rochester Institute of Technology, Dubai, UAE, “Next-Generation Network Intrusion Detection System (NG_NIDS)”

The Student Activities Committee congratulates the authors of the five chosen papers and thanks all participants in the SPC contest.

2nd PHASE – ORAL FINALS

This year, due to travel restrictions related to the Covid-19 pandemic, the SPC 2021 Oral Finals will be postponed! Hoping that the situation will be significantly better in the fall, the Finals will be organized in
October 2021. The final decision on the location and format will be announced in August 2021.

Vera Markovic

SPC Coordinator