Dr Domor Mienye, an AI scientist, has received the 2026 Annual Best Paper Award from Information, a peer-reviewed journal published by MDPI, for research on recurrent neural networks.
The paper, “Recurrent Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Review of Architectures, Variants, and Applications,” is a collaboration between researchers in South Africa and the United States.
Domor Mienye and Prof. Theo G. Swart are affiliated with the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, while Dr George Obaido is affiliated with the Centre for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California, Berkeley. The paper was published in Information in August 2024.
The study reviews major recurrent neural network architectures, including Long Short-Term Memory and Gated Recurrent Unit models, and examines their use in natural language processing, speech recognition, time-series forecasting, autonomous systems and other areas where sequential data is important.
The award is significant because all papers published in Information during the eligible period are considered. MDPI says its Best Paper Awards take into account scientific merit, originality, research impact, citations and readership. Winning the award therefore places the work among the journal’s leading publications from the period.
The paper has recorded more than 80,000 views and over 700 citations in less than two years. It was also ranked first on Information’s list of highly cited papers published in 2024 and was selected as an Editor’s Choice article by the journal.
The same research has received separate recognition from Preprints.org. Its preprint version was selected among 30 shortlisted papers in the Computer Science and Mathematics category for the Popular Preprints of the Decade Award 2016–2026, organised to mark the platform’s 10th anniversary.
The shortlist recognises papers that have recorded strong visibility and engagement on the platform over the past decade. The shortlisted works have moved to a public voting stage, after which the final award recipients will be selected.
For Domor Mienye and his co-authors, the latest award adds to the growing reach of a paper that has become widely referenced by researchers working on recurrent neural networks and related areas of machine learning. It also draws attention to research collaborations involving African scientists working with institutions in Africa and the United States.
Mienye has published widely in artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning, including research on healthcare, explainable AI and intelligent systems.
Information publishes research covering artificial intelligence, information science and technology, data, knowledge and communication, and currently has an Impact Factor of 4.3.
