THE REPORT
on the selection of the winner of the “Blažo Mirčevski” Award for papers
at the TELFOR 2021 conference
A total of 42 candidates were on the list of candidates for the Blažo Mirčevski Award. The proposal for the “Blažo Mirčevski” Award was submitted by 7 works. One of these works was shortlisted by the Jury for the Award.
The work of the jury took place in several stages. First, the fulfillment of the general conditions was looked at, followed by the text of the paper, the description of the conducted research, the concept and style of writing, the oral presentation, the answer to the questions, the quality of the visual presentation.After several rounds of eliminations, the jury reduced the possible candidates for the Award winners to three works:
Work 7.5. 120GHz Schottky Terahertz Transceivers with Graphene FET Sub-Harmonic Mixers by Surafel Berhanu Abegaz, Fetene Mulugeta Yigletu, Ephrem Teshale Bekele,
Work 11.11. Evaluating IPv6 Support in Kubernetes by Vojdan Kjorveziroski, Anastas Mishev, Sonja Filiposka,
Work 11.27. How does piano training affect manual dexterity and finger synergy? Authors: Milica Badža, Milica Lazić, Jana Živanović, Dimitrije Popović, Ivan Vajs, Milica M. Janković,
Characteristic for the shortlist of papers was the uniqueness of the research topics and the good presentation. All three works have authentic research topics that have not been encountered many times at TELFOR Conference, but also good presentation, helpfulness and willingness of exhibitors to answer all questions.
Paper topic 7.5. is very current, the young author Surafel Berhanu Abegaz addressed the problems well and the jury concluded that the authors sent a good work to Telfor. THz are certainly applicable frequencies for “beyond 5G”, although there are a lot of problems such as “phase noise” and the like. An additional value of this paper is the fact that the author compared his results with other authors. And he made some significant gains again.
In the cited literature, most of the references are older (2016-2018), which is quite out of date for the area of 5G networks. On the other hand, it is possible that not many researchers have really worked on a similar topic. However, there are several references from 2020 and they are mostly papers in journals from the IEEE Transactions family.
The work is done with very modest tools, the illustrations are simple. One gets the impression that the emphasis is on graphene synthesis. During the presentation, the author was very engaged in describing the details of the research, trying to express a compromise between the understandably low price, which is a positive effect, but also a decline in performance for extreme cases. A great role in understanding this work was played by the chairman of the session, Nenad Jevtić, who immediately asked the right question: … what is your preference – low price or quality of functions?
The Jury notes that so far there has been no serious candidate for the “Blažo Mirčevski” Award from African universities, so that is an interesting detail for our conference in terms of promotion.
Work 11.11. comes from Skopje, from the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Northern Macedonia. The young author Vojdan Kjorveziroski was noticed during the presentation. It was very lively, good style of English pronunciation, presentation very interesting and creative, answers to concrete questions and without covering up the shortcomings of the work.
The paper highlights the importance and problem related to the adoption of the IPv6 protocol at the current time when the IPv4 version is unable to address more than 232 servers in the Internet network while the IPv6 version provides the ability to identify up to 2128 addresses. The paper points to the role of providers in the process of adopting IPv6 protocols and is especially interesting and vital for processes in the field of big data and expansion of data centers.
However, despite the topicality of the topic, the setting of the experiment in this research is quite simple.
Topic 11.27. is multidisciplinary, but the work was announced in the section “Software tools and applications”, although at Telfor 2018, previous research on a similar topic was presented in the biomedical section. The work is based on an experiment that is described in great detail and illustrated with photographs and numerical results. The presentation of the young author, Milica Badža, was very likable, fluent and engaged, lived and relaxed, in good English. It can be concluded that the work was done with direct engagement. Explains tests well.
There were various questions, for example: Miroslav Popović, chairman: “pianists should be provided here” as well as “… and what is happening with piano keys”. Milica also gave competent answers to such very divergent questions.
The Jury estimates that several authors in this paper, a total of 6, are a consequence of the research related to the project, so it is not possible to more precisely determine the contribution of the first author.
The Jury unanimously estimates that the greatest personal contribution comes from the work 7.6. Therefore, the following order was determined:
1. Work 7.5. 120GHz Schottky Terahertz Transceivers with Graphene FET Sub-Harmonic Mixers by Surafel Berhanu Abegaz, Fetene Mulugeta Yigletu, Ephrem Teshale Bekele
2. Work 11.27. How does piano training affect manual dexterity and finger synergy? by Milica Badža, Milica Lazić, Jana Živanović, Dimitrije Popović, Ivan Vajs, Milica M. Janković
3. Work 11.11. Evaluating IPv6 Support in Kubernetes by Vojdan Kjorveziroski, Anastas Mishev, Sonja Filiposka
According to this decision, the winner of the “Blažo Mirčevski” Award for the best work of a young author at Telfor 2021 is
Surafel Berhanu Abegaz
The jury for the Blažo Mirčevski Award this year worked in the following composition:
Vladimir Orlić, PhD, President of the Jury
Marija Malnar, PhD
Nemanja Zdravkovic, PhD
Nikola Popović, M.Sci
Mihailo Tošović, B.Sc.
Julijana Mirčevski, B.Sc.
The jury used the opinion of several expert consultants to evaluate individual papers, but important for the shortlist of candidates was the opinion of former Award winners, Ljiljana Marijanovic, PhD Wiener University and Filip Sharevski, PhD Purdue University.
Belgrade, May 26, 2022