The paper co-authored by students, graduates, and faculty members of the Kyoto College of Informatics (KCGI) was selected for the "Best Paper Award" at the 8th International Conference on Smart Computing and Informatics (SCI-2026) held on April 28 and 29, 2026 at Swinburne University, Hanoi, Vietnam.The paper will be published in the Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems (LNNS) series of Springer Nature, one of the world's leading academic publishers.The award further enhances KCGI's reputation for cutting-edge IT and information education.
The five co-authors of the winning paper are Mamdul Islam Palt from Bangladesh and Ramishi Khan from Sri Lanka, both KCGI alumni, along with their supervisors, Professor Yue Goichi and Associate Professor Dinh Duy Thai from KCGI, and one student from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Natural Resources and Environment.
The paper, "On the Impact of Distance Metrics on Land Use and Land Cover Image Clustering," is a study that systematically examines the impact of different distance metrics on clustering results and proposes a two-step framework that allows distance selection using small labeled datasets and transfer application to large unlabeled satellite images.This research was internationally recognized as a practical and reproducible image clustering method for land use and land cover analysis, and received the Best Paper Award.
KCGI has many excellent students and faculty members from Japan and abroad.In line with its active research and educational activities, the institute has received a number of international awards.In March 2026, Professor Trevor Dawes, who teaches a course in Library and Information Science, is named Academic and Research Librarian of the Year by the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL).In October 2025, Professor Mark Hasegawa Johnson was named to the Forbes Accessibility 100, a list of top innovators in the field of accessibility for people with disabilities published by a global economic magazine.In September of the same year, Professor Seiichiro Aoki and Vice President Houichi Domochi won the "Best Short Paper Award" for their paper presented at the International Conference on Learning Evidence and Analytics (ICLEA 2025), an international conference on education.