Student researchers from the Center for Computational & Data Sciences (CCDS) of Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) have won the Best Paper Award at the 14th International Conference on Frontiers of Intelligent Computing: Theory and Applications (FICTA 2026).

FICTA 2026 was organized by the London Metropolitan University, UK, on June 08-09, 2026. The team comprised Kazi Md. Rakibul Hassan, Komol Krisna Paul, Ayman Rahman, Siam Tahsin Bhuiyan, and Samiul Karim Mazumder – all from the Medical Imaging Research & Analysis (MIRA) Wing of CCDS.

The award recognized the team's research on an artificial intelligence framework for riverine waste detection under real-world environmental conditions, conducted as part of their Final Year Design Project (FYDP).

The award-winning paper, "YOLO26m-CW: A Water-Augmented Spatial Attention Framework for Robust Riverine Waste Monitoring," was authored by Kazi Md. Rakibul Hassan, Komol Krisna Paul, and Ayman Rahman, fourth-year undergraduate students of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at IUB and undergraduate researchers of CCDS. The authors are currently preparing their undergraduate senior project (thesis) based on research.

There were also technical contributions from Siam Tahsin Bhuiyan, a fourth-year undergraduate student of CSE, and Samiul Karim Mazumder, Research Intern at CCDS.

The research was supervised by Dr. Md Rashedur Rahman, Assistant Professor of CSE and Co-Director of the MIRA and Next-gen Embedded SysTems (NEST) Wings of CCDS; Dr. Ashraful Islam, Assistant Professor of CSE and Director of CCDS; and Dr. Saadia Binte Alam, Associate Professor of CSE and Director of MIRA and Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Wings of CCDS.

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