From September 23 to 25, the Special Session on Women in Engineering and Intelligent Systems was held as part of the IEEE 24th International Symposium on Intelligent Systems and Informatics (SISY 2026) in Pula, Croatia, at the “Dr. Mijo Mirković” Faculty of Economics and Tourism, Juraj Dobrila University of Pula. The session was chaired by Panna Zsoldos, Secretary of the IEEE HS WIE AG.

The session took place in two blocks and featured 9 high-quality presentations showcasing the outstanding results of women researchers and their co-authors. We were delighted that the session had an international dimension this year: in addition to Hungarian researchers, researchers from Spain and Serbia also presented their work. The session had an inspiring and friendly atmosphere, and the breaks offered excellent opportunities for networking, professional discussions and community building. The presentations attracted a diverse audience of SISY participants, whose questions, constructive comments and insights contributed greatly to the success of the session.

The presentations covered a wide range of cutting-edge research topics, highlighting the diversity and interdisciplinary nature of engineering and computer science. Artificial intelligence received particular attention. Presentations covered benchmarking of multi-agent systems built on large language models (LLMs) and a comparative evaluation of medical domain-specific and general-purpose LLMs. In the field of AI safety, one talk presented a methodology for studying jailbreak prompts. Optimization and mathematical topics were also featured, including a systematic review of stopping criteria in metaheuristic algorithms, lattice-valued aggregation operators, and similarity-enhancing matrix products. Robotics (industrial applications of quadruped robots), IoT communication (LoRa mesh networks) and GIS-based social research were also represented.

Accepted papers and presenters:

  • Gergely Nyilas, Rita Fleiner, Patrik Dobrovodsky, Eszter Kail – AGORA-Bench: Benchmark for Large Language Model Based Multi-Agent Systems
  • Szandra Anna Laczi, Valéria Póser – Operationalizing Child-Language Jailbreak Prompts: A Methodological Framework for Controlled Transformation and Annotation
  • Kata Egres, Sándor Szénási – A Systematic Review of Stopping Criteria in Metaheuristic Optimization Algorithms
  • Andrea Pődör, Ourania Kounadi, Mariana Vallejo-Velázquez, Levente Dimén, Tamás Bartucz – Fear of Crime in Kecskemét: A Case Study Examining the Relationship with Patterns Across Gender and Age Group
  • Barbara Simon, Bernadett-Ildikó Balázsi-Bardocz, György Eigner, Lehel Dénes-Fazakas – Domain-Specific vs. General-Purpose LLMs in Medicine: An Empirical Evaluation of MedGemma-4B
  • María Eugenia Cornejo Piñero, Jesús Medina, Ivana Štajner-Papuga, Andreja Tepavčević – Migrativity of Lattice-Valued Aggregation Operators
  • Döníz Borsos, József Katona – Experimental Evaluation of LoRa Mesh Communication for Distributed IoT Sensor Networks
  • Vanja Stepanović, Andreja Tepavčević – Matrix Products Enhancing Similarity
  • Panna Zsoldos, Zsombor Zrubka, Péter Galambos – A Scoping Review of State-of-the-Art Industrial Use Cases, Hardware Platforms, and Reproducibility of Quadruped Robots

The papers will soon be available in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

On behalf of the IEEE HS WIE AG, we would like to thank the SISY organizing committee for the opportunity, the authors and reviewers for their valuable presentations and feedback, and especially Panna Zsoldos, who, in addition to helping organize the session, took charge of its on-site management and chaired it.

This event once again demonstrated that the presence and contribution of women researchers in engineering and computer science are indispensable, and we are proud to continue this inspiring tradition within the IEEE Hungary Section.