Dr. Cedric Angelo M. Festin officially became the new Chair of the Department of Computer Science (DCS) last June 1, 2005, replacing Dr. Ronald M. Tuñgol, who has left for Canada after serving for three years at the helm of the DCS.

Dr. Festin has been teaching in UP since 1992. In 1995, he left for the United Kingdom to pursue his PhD and returned in 2002. He graduated from UP Diliman with a degree in Bachelor of Computer Science and in MS Electrical Engineering. For this semester, he is currently teaching CS 255 and supervises CS 198 and CS 298.

In appointing a new faculty member as department chair, the Dean of the College of Engineering meets with the faculty to discuss the selection process. There is then a two-week period where faculty members may submit their nominations for the new head of the DCS. Once the list of nominees is finalized, the Dean proceeds to interview the nominees, which will eventually be the basis for the appointment of the next Department Chair.

When asked about his plans as the new Chair, Dr. Festin said he will do what it takes for students to excel academically, for the faculty to succeed, and for all elements of the Department to “bring home the bacon”. His current tasks involve the relocation of the DCS to the new building.

The UP Association of Computer Science Majors (UP CURSOR) and the UP Department of Computer Science held its annual College Survival for Computer Science Students (CS4CS) to welcome the new batch of CS freshmen to the Department on the morning of June 15, 2005 at the Engineering Theater.

Department Chair Dr. Cedric Festin officially opened the program with a welcome speech encouraging the freshmen to do their best in all their endeavors in college, and stressing that the incoming freshmen were quite blessed to be entering the program at a time of expansion and change.

He was followed by Dr. Susan Pancho-Festin, who gave a brief introduction to CS, Department policies and retention rules. Dr. Pancho-Festin gave a twist to the retention rules, where she introduced the freshmen to the Two-Strikes-You’re-Out rule and the Three-Strikes-You’re-Out rule (refer to the Department’s retention rules for more information).

To entertain the freshmen, a music video entitled “Tara CS Tayo!” was shown to illustrate what CS life in UP is like. Prepared by the UP CS Network, the concept for the video was based on the song “Biyahe Tayo” of DOT’s “Wow Philippines” campaign, to jive with the theme of the CS Freshmen Day, “WOW COMSCI”.

After the video, Dr. Festin went onstage once more to tackle the BSCS curriculum, explain the various research areas, introduce the faculty, and inspire the freshmen.

As the event aims to help the freshmen survive college, the next part of the program was a video presentation by UP CURSOR containing various survival tips that would be helpful for the freshmen. Junior students Teejay Roque and Kat Martin took the stage to give explanations for each survival tip, and shared their own experiences with the freshmen.

Representatives from the Engineering Student Council (ESC) then promoted the projects they will be launching for the year. CS Representatives Dino Lacdan, Geomar Lubaton and Jeffrey Quiambao presented their visions for the CS community, while ESC Chair Rhet De Guzman and Vice-Chair Daniel Icasiano promoted several college-wide projects, including the upcoming Engineering League of Excellence (ELE).

This was followed by presentations from the different CS-related organizations and Department service arms comprising the CS Network. These included the CRS Team, Eng’g Webteam, DCS SAs, UnPLUG, UP ACM, UP CompSoc, UP CURSOR and the UP Parser as well.

To end the program, Prof. Prospero Naval gave a speech underscoring the importance of the freshmen doing their best in their academics. But before everything ended, UP CURSOR’s Indakers entertained the freshmen with a dance number, grooving and shaking their bodies to the songs of Janet Jackson. Lunch was served afterwards at the Engineering Lawn.

Teams from the UP Diliman Department of Computer Science garnered first and third place in the local finals of Microsoft ImagineCup 2005, held at the Eugenio Lopez Activity training facility in Antipolo last June 7 and 8.

UPTeam2, the winning team, to be coached by TJ Vergel de Dios, will represent the Philippines in the world finals in Yokohama, Japan, this July 27 to August 1.

An annual programming competition for undergraduate students this time with the theme “Imagine a world where technology dissolves the boundaries between us,” the IC2005 local finals narrowed the competition down to three - two from UP, and one from Ateneo.

UPTeam1 (Kristine Marie Dario, Elmira Gay Sto. Domingo, Jeffrey Louie Quiambao, Jocelyn Mae Villaraza) developed iSchool, a web service inspired by UP’s UVLE, while UPTeam2 (Kristina Jane Baylon, Jon Eric Cantos, Rhea Therese Lucas, Sarah Kristine Roxas) came up with Vulcan, a customizable web application based on the Six Degrees of Separation principle.

The Association for Computing Machinery - University of the Philippines Student Chapter (UP ACM) bested 750 chapters worldwide — many of them from the US — by winning the recently concluded Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2004-2005 Student Chapter Excellence Awards.

UP ACM, the first and only Filipino ACM chapter, bagged two out of the five categories, Best Community Service and Best Recruitment Program. UP ACM, which joined the contest for only the first time, won 500 US dollars for each award.

Founded in 1947, ACM is world’s oldest and largest educational and scientific computing society. ACM’s student chapters are spread worldwide over 500 colleges and universities.

The Chapter Excellence Awards are given yearly to the chapters with outstanding Activities, Website, Recruitment Program, Community Service, and School Service.

Last year’s batch of winners were five North American chapters. This year saw the Philippines barging into the prestigious circle, winning not only the usual single category, but two.

The other three winners were from the University of Kansas (Activities), University of Texas at Austin (Website), and Dalhousie University (School Service).

Community Service That Matters

While UP ACM was able to bag the Best Recruitment Program award through the phenomenal increase in its member population (jumping from roughly a dozen to 90 in just one semester), winning the Best Community Service award was entirely another matter.

With last year’s Best Community Service award won by a US chapter donating a batch of computers to a middle school, UP ACM decided to go on another track. It believed in the power of imparting knowledge, not material objects.

Thus UP ACM held a computer literacy outreach program for the children of Barangay UP Campus last April 2005 in one of the DCS’ computer laboratories. Sixty children from underprivileged families attended the two-day event. (See related article.)

The Department Computer Science (DCS) won two awards in the 2005 Undergraduate Research Competition held last April 21 at the 2nd Floor Lobby of Melchor Hall.

A field of twenty-nine competing research groups from various fields was narrowed down to ten finalists, four of which were declared the contest winners.

DCS seniors Alfonso Miguel Mante, Mark Alvin Ligaya and Isabel Casas grabbed second place with their thesis called “e-NoDeS: Early Nodule Detection Software,” while Kevin Manansala, Karen Desiree Tan, and Pauline Rodriguez won third for “AMASSIS: A Multi-Agent System Simulation of the Immune System.”

Coming in first place was a group from the Department of Chemical Engineering (DChE), with the project entitled “The Pyrolysis of Waste Polystyrene and Used Motor Oil to Diesel Additive”. Tied at third place with the DCS group was another DChE project entitled “A Preliminary Investigation on the Development of Nanocomposites from Recycled Polycarbonate and Organo-Montmorillonite.”

The four winners were given Php 50,000, Php 30,000 and Php 20,000, respectively, along with glass trophies. Both e-NoDeS and AMASSIS were projects developed for the past year under the DCS and Prof. Prospero Naval, Jr advised both projects.

“We never expected it at first because originally our group, GroupAIM/e-NoDeS, was given an INC. We still worked during the summer while everyone else was job hunting or on vacation,” Mante relating his URC experience. “Then a day or two before the contest we found out that Prof. Naval gave us our grades and we would be able to graduate on time, and then we won! We were so happy!” he added.

Mante also encouraged the incoming seniors taking CS 198 to always have regular consultations with their advisers, listen very well and always jot down notes.

Two of the oldest organizations of the CS Network, UP CURSOR and UP CompSoc, along with 16 other Engineering-based organizations, participated in this year’s Freshmen Orientation Program Committee (FOPC 2005), with CURSOR placing an impressive fourth among all participants.

To shoulder the costs of holding the numerous FOPC projects, the 81 FOPC member organizations fulfilled minimum requirements such as a certain number of kilos of newspapers and white papers, t-shirt orders, and tambay hours, all translating into points for each org.

After the first half of the tambay month, UP CURSOR emerged on top with a commanding lead of some 25,000 points. At the tally’s end, CURSOR finished fourth overall, behind first-placer UP Statistical Society, and was ranked second best among all Engineering organizations, trailing IE Club.

Being part of the top seven in this year’s race for FOPC chairpersonship, UP CURSOR, which is one of only five FOPC member orgs whose total consolidated points reached the six-digit mark, will be part of the FOPC Steering Committee next year.

The FOPC is the umbrella alliance of various recognized organizations in UP Diliman. The FOPC took charge, together with the Office of Guidance Counseling, of welcoming about 3,000 freshmen last June. The FOPC held a series of events for freshies this year, such as the free film showing of “Closer” and free concert named “Freshteeg!”

Through the FOPC block bidding, UP CompSoc and UP CURSOR handled the G-11 and G-10 CS blocks, respectively.

Prof. Rommel Feria, a senior faculty of the Department, is now a columnist of one of the country’s leading newspapers.

“Of Macs and Tux,” Prof. Feria’s column, appears every Monday and Wednesday in the TechNews section of the Manila Bulletin, starting three months ago. Twice a week he shares his experiences as a guru in Macintosh, Linux, and Open Source technologies.

It is not the first time, however, that he has been immersed in writing. He has been a writer of a US-based Digital Camera magazine and a local Science magazine in the late 90’s.

“Writing on tech stuff for the masses appeals to me because it allows me to extend my ‘teaching’ beyond UP. I believe that information available locally are not sufficient or are too Microsoft-centric,” he says. “Writing is important to us — either writing a technical report or a journal article. This is actually a requirement — to publish in scientific journals.”

Prof. Feria is also the current Director of the UP Computer Center (CC), as well as the head of the Biomedical Computing Group of the Department.

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day, but teach him how to fish, and you feed him for life.

This was the guiding axiom for the UP Diliman Department of Computer Science (DCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery - UP Student Chapter (UP ACM) as they conducted the Summer Computer Literacy Outreach Program (SCLOP) last April 11-12, 2005 at Room 209 of Melchor Hall.

Sixty children aged from eight to 18, all hailing from Barangay UP Campus were immersed in a short introductory course on computers. The children were from underprivileged families and had little to no computer experience.

Two sessions were held each day, the morning session for the eight to 12 year old kids, and the afternoon for the 12-18 year olds. Throughout the two-day training, 17 UP ACM members served as teachers and aides.

The SCLOP covered basic hardware, basic UI navigation, basic file management, typing, basic graphics, basic Internet and OpenOffice.org. The open source Fedora Core 2 environment and other open source software, such as TuxType, TuxPaint, and Mozilla Firefox were introduced to the children.

The Diliman Computer Science Foundation (DCSF) provided the funds for the children’s snacks. Certificates were given to the children at each session’s end.

The SCLOP was the successor of last year’s summer outreach program held by the DCS faculty. The previous outreach also targeted Barangay UP Campus children as its beneficiaries.

For more information, visit the SCLOP website at http://upacm.org/activities/sclop.jsp.

DCS student and UP Parser news editor Carlos Miguel M. Lasa was awarded the 2005 Procter & Gamble Student Excellence Award (SEA) last March 17 at the Manila Peninsula Hotel in Makati City.

He was one of the twelve awardees chosen this year, selected from a field of around 400 candidates, with three each coming from UP Diliman, DLSU, AdMU and UST.

The awarding ceremony was held in the Rigodon Ballroom of the Manila Peninsula, where Lasa bested the other four SEA finalists from the College of Engineering of UPD (three coming from Industrial Engineering, one from Civil Engineering).

It was the first time a DCS student won the award. Along with Lasa, UP students Donald Ngwe (Econ) and Maureen Valencia (BA) were also awarded.

The P&G SEA started in Academic Year 1999-2000 as a partnership program between P&G and its four partner universities in the academe. SEA seeks to recognize exceptional students who have consistently demonstrated academic excellence and organizational leadership and who best exemplify the ideals of their respective universities.

Together with the objective of recognizing the top students in their penultimate year, this year’s event was also the introduction to the celebration of P&G Philippines’ 70 years of “Touching Lives, Improving Filipino Life”.

The selection process was done through a nomination by the dean of the college, an application to the SEA, taking a problem-solving test, and undergoing several formal interviews with P&G managers.

Lasa, a former Parser managing editor, had previously served in the Engineering Student Council as a CS Representative during AY 2004-2005. He is currently a senior in the BSCS program and is the president of the UP Association of Computer Science Majors (UP CURSOR).

Our very own Ma’am Riza Theresa B. Batista, together with Angel B. Calayag, won first place in the recently-concluded Call for Convergence: The Telic Communications, Inc. VoiceXML Contest with their project, the UP Diliman Voice Enabled Guide.

The University of the Philippines Diliman Voice-Enabled Visitor’s Guide conveniently and effectively finds directions within the UP Diliman campus using automated and interactive voice responses to user’s queries.

Batista and Calayag will be awarded $2000.00. The contest was sponsored by SUN Microsystems, Voxsant, and Kooltel.com.

Ms. Riza Batista and Ms. Angel Calayag are also currently completing their Masteral degrees in Computer Science, and are groupmates in CS 260: Advanced Software Engineering.

Visit http://www.callforconvergence.com for more details.