The five finalists for this years SPC2020 gave a presentation on-line on June 16 within the MELECON 2020 Palermo virtual conference.
IEEE Region 8 awards prize money of $800, $500 and $200 for the best three papers respectively. There is also a prize of $250 as the “Dick Poortvliet Award” for the Student Branch of the first prize student.
Following the five presentations, that were very well prepared and presented and in general well answered, the jury members came to a conclusion with the following results.
FIRST PRIZE Kristjan Stopar, University of Maribor, Slovenia, “Device for visual kinesthetic navigation of the blind and visually impaired.”
SECOND PRIZE Matthias Swiggers, KU Leuven, Belgium, ” A Four-Quadrant Switched-Capacitor DC-DC Convertor Enabling Power-Efficient Lab-Grade Potentiostats.”
THIRD PRIZE Mark Cauchi, University of Malta, Malta, “ An Improved Variable Neighbourhood Search Algorithm for Selective Dial-a-Ride Problem.”
The other two finalists were
Maxim Van den Abeele, KU Leuven, Belgium, ” Object-Centric Street Scene Synthesis with Generative Adversarial Networks.”
Najla Al-Thani, Alreem Albuainain, Fatima Alnaimi, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar, “Drones for Sheep Livestock Monitoring.”
The papers and the oral presentations were judged by four jury members
Prof Mustapha Benjillali from INPT, Morocco
Professor Vera Markovic from University of Nis, Serbia
Professor Giambattista Gruosso from Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Professor Paul Micallef from University of Malta, Malta who is also the SPC Co-ordinator