The nexGIN RC team has earned an unprecedented honor for the country by winning the silver medal in Human-Competitive awards (HUMIES) at GECCO 2009. Dr. Muddassar Farooq, Director, Next Generation Intelligent Networks Research Center, FAST National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences Islamabad, presented the team's work in Montreal, Canada.
GECCO 2009 is the world's best forum for Bio-inspired computing. Generally more than 200 papers are accepted for the conference out of 500+ submissions. But Humies' submission criteria is so tough that generally 9-10 papers become eligible for the competition. This year 9 entries were submitted and out of these 7 were shortlisted for final presentations on July 10, 2009 in Montreal Canada. nexGIN RC had both of its entries shortlisted.
The Judging Committee consisted of Wolfgang Banzhaf, John Koza, Darrell Whitley, Riccardo Poli, and Erik Goodman. These are the most respected names not only in evolutionary computing but also in Computer Science.
The nexGIN RC team's entry based on the papers A Hybrid GA-PSO Fuzzy System for User Identification on Smart Phones and Keystroke-based User Identification on Smart Phones have won the silver medal. These papers can be downloaded from the publications section of the project's website.
The silver medal is worth $3000. All credit goes to Shahzad and Saira who did this remarkable work. The gold medal was won by Steffany Forrest - the most distinguished researcher in CS - whose paper "A sense of Self in Unix Processes" has more than 1000 citations and is among the top 3% cited papers overall in CS.
This is for the first time in the history of the conference that a team from Asia has been among the top 3. We hope that these efforts will bear fruit and help to change the image of Pakistan.
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