Nigerian AI scientist Dr. Domor Mienye and his co-authors have won the annual Best Paper Award of Information, a peer-reviewed international journal published by Switzerland-based academic publisher MDPI.

Mienye, who is also the All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA), gubernatorial hopeful for Bayelsà State, has authored and co-authored research across artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning and has worked in both academic and technology environments in Africa and Europe.

The award was given for their paper, “Recurrent Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Review of Architectures, Variants, and Applications,” published in August 2024.

The work brought together Mienye and Prof Theo G. Swart of the University of Johannesburg’s Institute for Intelligent Systems in South Africa and Dr George Obaido, affiliated with the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence and Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Their research provides a detailed review of recurrent neural networks and some of their best-known variants, including Long Short-Term Memory and Gated Recurrent Unit models. It also looks at how the technology is being used in natural language processing, speech recognition, forecasting, autonomous vehicles and other applications involving sequential data.

The annual award is open to papers published in Information during the eligible period. MDPI assesses eligible works using measures that include scientific quality, originality, research impact, citations and readership, making the award one of the journal’s main recognitions for published research.

The winning paper has become one of the journal’s most widely read and cited recent publications. It has recorded more than 80,000 views and over 700 citations within two years of publication. Information also ranked it first among its highly cited papers from 2024, while its academic editors selected it for the journal’s Editor’s Choice collection.

Its reach has extended beyond the journal. The preprint version of the research was recently named among 30 shortlisted works in Computer Science and Mathematics for Preprints.org’s Popular Preprints of the Decade Award 2016–2026.

The decade award is part of activities marking 10 years of Preprints.org and recognises research that has attracted strong readership and engagement on the platform. The shortlisted papers are currently being considered through a public voting process before the final winners are announced.

The recognition comes at a time of continued global interest in neural networks and artificial intelligence, particularly in areas such as language technologies, healthcare, forecasting and intelligent systems.

The citation record of the paper shows that the work has already become a reference point for researchers studying recurrent neural networks and their applications.