A team of CSE students from the American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB) has achieved remarkable success at the prestigious 7th International Conference on Activity and Behavior Computing (ABC) 2025, held at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE, from April 21–25, 2025.

The conference, sponsored by IEEE, featured four international challenge competitions: BeyondSmile2025 (Stevens Institute of Technology, USA), Silent Speech2025 (Qatar University), Virtual Data2025 (Osaka University, Japan) and Parkinson2025 (University of East London, UK)

The AIUB team, named Team Persistence, participated in the BeyondSmile2025 challenge titled “A Challenge on Detecting Depression through Facial Behaviors and Head Gestures.” The team members from AIUB included 4 students from CSE department: Md. Rakibul Islam, Dip Sarker, Md. Tafhimul Haque Sadi, Labib Hasan Bayzid. They were supervised by Dr. Md. Kabiruzzaman (Assistant Professor, Department of EEE, AIUB), and Dr. Shahera Hossain (University of East London, UK).

Team Persistence secured 1^st place in the challenge and was awarded a cash prize of 100,000 Japanese Yen. Additionally, their research paper titled: “Facial Behavior-Based Depression Detection with Bi-LSTM and Evaluation via Universal and Hybrid Methods” received the Best Paper Award among all challenge submissions for BeyondSmile2025.

This outstanding achievement highlights AIUB’s commitment to fostering excellence in research, innovation, and global academic collaboration.