nexGIN team from FAST NUCES wins silver medal at GECCO 2009

Dr. Muddassar Farooq, Director, Next Generation Intelligent Networks Research Center, FAST National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences Islamabad, reports from Montreal in Canada that the nexGIN RC team has earned an unprecendented honor for the country by winning the silver medal in Hummies Competition at GECCO 2009.

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 Hummies submission criteria is so tough that generally 9-10 papers become eligible for the competiton. This year 9 entries were submitted and out of these 7 were shortlisted for final presentations on July 10, 2009  in Montreal Canada. nexGIN had both of its entries shortlisted.

The Judging Committee consisted of Wolfgang Banzhaf, John Koza, Darrell Whitley, Riccardo Poli, and Erik Goodman. According to Dr. Muddassar, these are the most respected names not only in evolutionary computing but also in Computer Science.

The results were announced today and I am delighted to inform everyone that the nexGIN 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.

The silver medal is worth $3000. According to Dr. Muddassar, nexGIN missed the gold medal, which is worth $5000, by a very small margin. He said that all credit should go to Shahzad and Saira who did this remarkable work. The gold medal was won by  Steffany Forrest – the most distinguised 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. She gave an excellent presentation.

This is for the first time in the history of the conference that a team from Asia has been among the top 3. Dr. Mudassar Farooq hopes that these efforts will bear fruit and help to change the image of Pakistan.

Congratulations to Saira, Shahzad, Dr. Muddassar Farooq and the entire nexGIN team for this amazing achievement in computer science research. All of us are very proud of you. Well done!