We are pleased to announce that MSc Eng. Aleksandra Urbańczyk and PhD Eng. Piotr Urbańczyk have received the Best Paper Award at the PP-RAI 2026 conference.
The awarded paper was presented in the “Problem Solving and Optimisation” session and focused on extending the classical Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The authors proposed a novel approach that enhances the diversity of potential solutions, which is crucial for effectively exploring complex problem spaces.
The work introduces two groups of strategies:
• approaches inspired by socio-cognitive mechanisms, leveraging knowledge acquired by individual “particles” during the search process,
• methods based on introducing controlled randomness into the optimization process.
The results show that the effectiveness of these strategies depends not only on the mechanisms themselves but, above all, on how they are integrated into the algorithm’s dynamics. In particular, it proved important whether randomness influences the determination of particle movement direction or the update of their positions.
The best results were achieved for variants that preserve the social component of the algorithm while modifying only the cognitive part or introducing controlled randomness into it.
This distinction at PP-RAI confirms the high quality of research conducted at the Faculty of Computer Science at AGH in the fields of artificial intelligence and optimization methods.
Congratulations to the authors, and we wish them continued scientific success!