The work of FER scientists Asst. Prof. Marko Đurasević, Prof. Stjepan Picek, and Prof. Domagoj Jakobović has been recognized as the best paper at this year’s EuroGP conference. Their paper, titled "Systematic Evaluation of Evolving Highly Nonlinear Boolean Functions in Odd Sizes", was presented in April 2025 in Trieste and drew significant attention from the scientific community gathered at the world’s leading event dedicated to genetic programming.

The research focuses on the design of symmetric cryptographic primitives through the analysis of properties of Boolean functions. The authors employed various evolutionary algorithms to discover functions with maximum nonlinearity—a critical property in building secure cryptographic systems.

This award-winning paper is the result of international collaboration with researchers Claude Carlet (University of Bergen) and Luca Mariot (University of Twente).

The results are impressive. The research team successfully used evolutionary approaches to construct Boolean functions with 9 variables and extremely high nonlinearity—a feat not previously achieved by any known metaheuristic optimization algorithm. This breakthrough makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the complex structure of the Boolean function space and brings the scientific community closer to solving the still open problem of determining their maximum nonlinearity.

EuroGP, as the oldest and only conference exclusively focused on genetic programming—a branch of evolutionary algorithms with applications in optimization and machine learning—is a key platform for showcasing the latest advancements in this field.