PHD STUDENT SARA GJORGJIEVA WINS BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD AT IEEE CEC 2026

PhD Student Sara Gjorgjieva Wins Best Student Paper Award at IEEE CEC 2026

We are delighted to announce that Sara Gjorgjieva, a PhD student at the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School (IPS) and member of the AutoLearn-SI research team at the Jožef Stefan Institute, has received the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC 2026), held in Maastricht, the Netherlands.

The award was presented for the paper "On the Structural (Dis)Agreement of Landscape Representations in Black-Box Optimization," co-authored by Sara Gjorgjieva, Eva Tuba, Barbara Koroušić Seljak, Carola Doerr, and Tome Eftimov.

The research investigates how different landscape representations capture—or fail to capture—the structural properties of black-box optimization problems. By systematically analyzing the agreement and disagreement between these representations, the study provides new insights toward developing more reliable, interpretable, and data-driven optimization methodologies.

IEEE CEC is one of the world's leading conferences in evolutionary computation and is part of the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI)—the flagship event of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, bringing together thousands of researchers working in evolutionary computation, neural networks, fuzzy systems, and artificial intelligence.

Congratulations to Sara on this outstanding achievement and to all co-authors for this well-deserved recognition!

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