The 2003 IEEE Region 8 Student Paper Contest received 11 papers from 11 Student Branches in 9 countries:
- Belgium, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve
- Egypt, Ain Shams University, Cairo
- Egypt, Alexandria University
- Germany, Universität Karlsruhe
- Israel, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa
- Malta, University of Malta
- Netherlands, Universiteit Twente, Enschede
- Romania, “Gh. Asachi” Technical University of Iasi
- Slovenia, University of Ljubljana
- Slovenia, University of Maribor
- South Africa, University of Pretoria
The oral finals took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on 23 September 2003, as part of EUROCON 2003, the International Conference on Computer as a Tool (22-24 September 2003).
The three winners were:
- Ulrich Stein and Marwan Younis (Universität Karlsruhe, Germany) Suppression of range ambiguities in synthetic aperture radar systems: Stein
- Els Kok (Universiteit Twente, Enschede, Netherlands) Completely multimode arrayed waveguide grating-based wavelength demultiplexer: kok
- Noha A. El-Yamany (Alexandria University, Egypt) A new fuzzy gradient-adaptive lossy predictive coding system for still image compression: yamany
The other two papers selected for the oral finals were:
- Eugene van Wyk (University of Pretoria, South Africa) Design of an integrated optical receiver in a standard CMOS process: vanwyk
- Marvin Bugeja (University of Malta) Non-linear swing-up and stabilizing control of an inverted pendulum system: bugeja
The five jury members were:
- Martin Bastiaans, Eindhoven, Netherlands, IEEE R8 SPC coordinator
- Franc Bratkovic, Ljubljana, Slovenia
- Kamel Hassan, Cairo, Egypt
- Javier Macías-Guarasa, Madrid, Spain
- Kurt Richter, Graz, Austria
Martin Bastiaans and Javier Macias were unable to attend the oral finals; they were replaced by Tony Davies and Baldomir Zajc, while the oral session was chaired by Kurt Richter.