Hannes Kath, Thiago S. Gouvêa and Daniel Sonntag were presented with the Best Student Paper Award at the 14th BUIS Days 2025 – the VLBA Symposium in Oldenburg from 5 to 6 June 2025 – for their paper ‘A Look Under the Hood of the Xprize Rainforest Competition System’ .
The conference, which took place at ecos work spaces and focused on the use of operational environmental information systems in smart and sustainable infrastructure, brought together over 60 participants and featured 32 accepted papers. Supported by the Centre for Digital Innovation in Lower Saxony (ZDIN) and the Oldenburg-East Frisian Water Association (OOWV), outstanding work was recognised in three Best Award categories during the event.
The award-winning work examines the Xprize Rainforest competition system and presents innovative tools such as YAPAT for annotating extensive bioacoustic datasets. Using methods such as active learning, transfer learning and audio separation, the researchers are contributing to the efficient identification of species and the monitoring of biodiversity.
