The first IEEE EMBS International Student Conference (ISC2013) was held 8-10 October 2013 at Cairo University, Egypt. The conference was intended to provide a forum for students to meet and exchange experiences at the local, regional, and international levels, as well as offer both undergraduate and postgraduate students an opportunity to practice, firsthand, the process of scientific research and publication. ISC 2013 was a “by students for students” event in that students served as the organizers, speakers, reviewers, and track chairs for all of the conference activities.
Regardless of the fact that the political circumstances in Egypt were uncertain at the time, 265 students attended ISC 2013. And because many international students experienced problems traveling to Egypt to present their work in person, a Skype presentation option was available for all international students to present their papers to encourage them to participate in the conference activities.
The conference activities included poster sessions and project exhibitions as well as talks and sessions on a wide range of topics including imaging and image processing, brain research, biorobotics, and signal processing. Participants were able to attend workshops on bioinformatics, basic robotics, and embedded systems, and the three-day event concluded with a dinner with industry leaders. Awards were also presented to the following students:
- The first-place Best Paper Award was presented to Azam Hamidi Nekoo of Sharif University of Technology, Iran, for the paper “Non-Rigid Registration of Breast MR Images Using Intensity-Unbiased Force in Variational Motion Estimation.” Nekoo received an award of US$1,500 for travel to the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference in Chicago, in August 2014.
- The second-place Best Paper Award was presented to Hesham G. Moussa, Bilal S. AlHabash, Menatalla D. Shehab ElDin, and Yomna ElSaboni of the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, for the paper “Eye-Tracking Based Visual Aid for Vision Impairment.” The team was awarded US$600.
- The third-place Best Paper Award was presented to Samar M. Abdel Fattah and Reem Lotfy of Cairo University, Egypt, for the paper “Experimental and Numerical Optimization of Coil Performance in TMS.” The team was awarded US$400.
- The Best Project Award was presented to Ahmed Fahim Shaltout, Khaled Samir, Alaa Sami Abdelhamid, and Safaa Arafa of the High Technology Institute, Egypt, for the paper “Automatic Making and Delivery of the Dialysate Solution.” The team was awarded US$300.
The local winning teams (first-, second-, and third-place best papers, and best project) were nominated for the Misr El-Kheir Awards; two students are now eligible to win the award of US$5,000. In addition, Intel awarded the top two projects a one-year license for McAfee Anti-Virus Software (five licenses per team).