Another international research milestone for SBME students: their paper, “MicroEnsemble: A Patient-Anchor and Label-Anchor Contrastive Ensemble for Longitudinal Microbiome Classification”, has been accepted for oral presentation at CIBB 2026, the 21st International Conference on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, taking place at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, from September 2–4, 2026.

Developed by Ghada Elboghdady, Amr Doma, Ahmed Taha, Sama Mohamed, and Youssef Awad, the work grew out of their graduation project on contrastive learning for longitudinal gut microbiome analysis, under the supervision and mentorship of Professor Dr. Tamer Basha, Assistant Lecturer Peter Salah, and Teaching Assistant Yara Elshamy.

MicroEnsemble introduces a contrastive learning framework that combines patient-level and label-level representations to improve classification of longitudinal microbiome data, exploring how artificial intelligence can extract meaningful patterns from complex biological data collected from patients over time.

CIBB is an international conference bringing together researchers working on computational intelligence, machine learning, bioinformatics, biostatistics, and medical informatics. The 2026 edition received a record number of submissions, making the selection of MicroEnsemble for oral presentation a notable recognition of the team’s work.

The CIBB acceptance marks another outcome of the team’s graduation research. Their paper “Unlocking Hidden Patterns: Transfer Learning Boosts Insulin Prediction Leveraging Unlabelled Gut Microbiome Data” was also previously accepted at IEEE EMBC 2026 in Toronto, Canada, extending the team’s work at the intersection of AI, microbiome analysis, and biomedical engineering.

The Systems and Biomedical Engineering Department congratulates the students and their supervisors on this achievement and wishes them continued success as they present their research to the international computational biomedical research community in Rome.

🌍 Official CIBB 2026 Conference Website