The final day of CECIIS 2026, Friday, 18 September, opened with the third part of the Intelligent Systems session. Papers covered spiking neural networks for biomedical data, efficient prediction in IoT systems, quantisation of generative adversarial networks, and machine learning for classifying books by subject.

After the break, two sessions ran in parallel. Cyber-Physical Systems and Intelligent Energy covered securing user data in mobile apps, pneumatic positioning control, and flexibility in PV-rich distribution networks. The session The Next Wave of Intelligent Systems covered agentic middleware for the cloud-edge continuum, federated learning for smart-city security, trust in chatbots, and an AI companion for self-regulated learning.

Throughout the day, a large Online Session brought together researchers from across Europe and beyond. Their papers covered authentic learning scenarios, responsible and green AI use, skill shortages and workforce planning, and AI-driven search in low-resource languages. The programme ended with Digital Transformation and Corporate Culture, which looked at generative AI in business process modelling, cybersecurity in healthcare under NIS2, and a trustworthy GDPR compliance assistant.

CECIIS 2026 closed with a closing event at Restaurant Park, where this year's awards were presented. The Best Paper Award went to Kolok Peter of the University of Žilina Department of Technical Cybernetics for the paper "Correlation-Based Reduction of Environmental Input Variables for Efficient GRU-Based Prediction in IoT Systems". Dino Vlahek received an award for reviewing the most papers and student abstracts, in recognition of his valuable contribution to the conference's review process. Congratulations to both!

The closing event was also a chance to share final impressions and to look ahead: the theme of the next conference will be "Intelligent Systems for Human-AI Collaboration". Thank you to all speakers, session chairs, reviewers, participants and partners who made this edition so rich and inspiring. We look forward to welcoming you back in Varaždin next year.

Relive the final day of the conference in the gallery below.