Crimson Crux

UP Diliman’s Department of Computer Science celebrates 25 years of excellence in computing diversity in its week-long Silver Flame, to be held from February 27 to March 3. Everyone’s invited to a week filled with symposia, company talks, various competitions, and a culminating night -– all of which showcase the intelligence, innovativeness, and flair that UP DCS students have been known for.

The theme Silver Flame honors the silver anniversary of the Department while highlighting the fiery fervor for the Department’s pursuit of excellence; rightfully so, for DCS students are known within the College of Engineering as the DCS Firefoxes.

Incidentally, this is going to be the last time that the UPD DCS shall celebrate its anniversary in Melchor Hall. The department is slated to move to a new, larger building early next year; one can also think of Silver Flame as the Department’s grand farewell to the historic edifice.

Inquiries can be made through email (upcsnetwork@gmail.com). The week’s packed lineup of great events:

February 27, Monday

Engineering Theater

8:30 - Opening Ceremonies

10:00 - Undergraduate Research Symposium: Networking and Distributed Systems

12:00 - Grand Pakain

1:00 - Company Talk by Accenture: Accenture Education Program (Summer Intership)

2:00 - Undergraduate Research Symposium: Computer Security

4:00 Student-Teacher Dialogue

February 28, Tuesday

Engineering Theater

8:30 - Undergraduate Research Symposium: Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics

12:00 - Lunch break

1:00 - Talk by Dr. Paco Sandejas: Career Paths

2:00 - Undergraduate Research Symposium: Biomedical Informatics

March 1, Wednesday

8:30 - Distinguished Alumni Lecture by Prof. Peter Valdes (Engineering Theater)

- CS 32 Quiz Bee (MH 233A)

- Java Cup (MH 209, MH 215)

- Siemens Company Exam for Batch 1(MH 515)

12:00 - Break

- Accenture Company Exam (BE AVR)

1:00 - Company Talk by Innove: WiFi / Globelines Broadband (BE AVR)

2:00 - CS 12 Programming Competition (MH 209)

- Quizzardry (Engineering Theater)

March 2, Thursday

8:30 - 2nd UP ACM Programming Competition (MH 215)

- Webmaster’s Challenge (NEC AVR)

- Siemens Company Exam for Batch 2 (MH 525)

12:00 - Lunch Break

1:00 - Awarding Ceremonies (Engineering Theater)

March 3, Friday

8:30 - The UP Parser Editorial Exam (MH 233A)

10:00 - Company Talk by Gametel: Mobile Games (Engineering Theater)

11:00 - Company Talk by Siemens (Engineering Theater)

12:00 - Lunch Break

1:00 - CS 196 Presentation (BE AVR)

2:00 - Company Talk by Anxa: Introduction to Mobile Application Development
(Engineering Theater)

5:30 - Flame On!: The CS Night (Blue Onion, Eastwood)

UP ACM members, clear your calendars for the first GA of the year!

General Assembly (Recruitment and Renewal, Free Food, and possibly Parlor Games, haha)

Feb13, 5:00 PM @ D.Consunji Room, UP Bahay ng Alumni

See you there!

Another victory for UP Diliman’s Department of Computer Science, which is definitely experiencing a golden year!*Congratulations to Ardee Aram, Michael Chua, Prem Rara, and Linda Sarmiento, champions of this year’s Clash of the Brains, a computer science quiz show held by the LSCS. Ma’am Joyce Avestro coached the winning team, which beat ADMU, FEU, UST, and MIT.

The UP team actually got off to the worst start, finishing dead last after the first round. The team managed to claw back to contention in the second canto (third in the standings).

However, it was in the homestretch (difficult round) where UP bared its fangs, reeling one correct answer after another. The result is history.

Again, congrats to the quartet. You did the University proud!

*The whole acad year has been a parade of honors for the UP Diliman DCS, from the UP ACM Int’l Excellence award to the Imagine Cup to the PESO semifinals to the TMTC to the BPI-DOST Science Award. Whew. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully, more to come.

Ever wanted to create your own mobile phone game? Or itching to get known and rewarded for your mad game development skills?

Then drop by the Mobigame 2005 Seminar to be held this Friday at UP Diliman. Mobigame is a mobile game development competition and training sponsored by MMOG Philippines and DLSU. Get to ask the questions which matter, get the facts straight about this unique test of talents. Hear from the personalities behind the competition. And of course, freebies await!

This leg of the Mobigame 2005 school tour is proudly hosted by the Philippines’ one and only award-winning Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) chapter, UP ACM.

UPDATE (11/24/05): Competition mechanics can be found here.

…is the name of the game a blogger shouldn’t play. Apologies for having been late on the updates. The past week proved to be a hectic one (but of course, a lame excuse); Wednesday was the first day of my last semester in UP Diliman. I’ve also recorded my first sleepless night for the young term — I wrote and collated a large chunk of our full business plan for the Philippine Emerging Startups Open (PESO) Challenge. (Look for team Rijndael’s public summary here.)

Yesterday was the big day for the week, as I attended the Launching of the UP Diliman Department of Computer Science’s new abode. Presenting, “Helm’s Deep”:

Others prefer to call it “Mount Olympus”. More specifically, its the new College of Engineering Library and Department of Computer Science Building, slated to be in use by the next academic year. Pity our batch won’t be able to use it. (Masteral studies, here I come? Cough, cough.)

Alright, that’s enough. Back to business.

…But not necessarily to have excelled in it!

Lisp ranks up there among the most difficult languages I’ve tried. The UP Diliman BS CS program exposes its students to a wide array of programming languages and paradigms (object-oriented, expression-oriented, and so on), and Lisp was one of those ‘heavyweights’ in CS 150. Other languages were Perl, Tcl, Haskell, Python, Smalltalk, and Prolog.The good and bad memories of Lisp:

1. GOOD. Of course, hurdling a language most programmers would find alien always feels good.
   
2. BAD. “Give an overview of the Lisp syntax” was the question I drew for a 5-minute oral exam. It was the only topic I wasn’t prepared for out of a dozen.
3. GOOD. Sophia and I managed to finish LUKIM: A Pure Lisp Interpreter in Java on the deadline, evading an Incomplete grade!
4. BAD. Have you tried coding a Lisp program by hand in a pressure-packed exam?

Even steven, I guess!

*Those nice Lisp logos come from Lisperati.com.

I quote from a TechnologyReview.com article:

“In a report for the National Science Foundation in 2000, the Carnegie Mellon researchers showed that freshmen in CS1 who used Alice [a program to teach programming through a game framework] average a B grade, while those in the control group who didn’t use Alice averaged a C.

Furthermore, retention rates — the proportion of students using Alice in CS1 who moved on to CS2 — rose from 47 percent to 88 percent.”

Several universities around the world are also using gaming-related courses to reverse the alarming slide in computer science enrollees.

I wonder when will UP Diliman’s DCS have a course on gaming or gaming development. Closest to such a course might be CS 176 (Computer Graphics) and CS 174 (Mobile Computing — mobile phone games, anyone?). Here’s a confession: as an avid gamer in high school, I took BS Computer Science because I wanted to create my own games.

Fortunately, our student organization, UP ACM, has two Special Interest Groups (SIGs) related to gaming — the Gaming Guild and the Graphics SIG. I really hope the SIG Heads present more exciting and informative projects for the second semester.

Presenting two of our “babies” who ate up our time for the past month:

Qualifier, Philippine Emerging Startups Open (PESO) Challenge
Finalist, UP Diliman College of Engineering Marketing Competition

S^infinity is a commercial mobile phone service being developed in UP Diliman. Specifics are under wraps…for now. Behind the concept of S^infinity is Team Rijndael (pronounced “Rhine-doll”, after a Belgian-born cryptographic algorithm).

Team Rijndael made it to the September 9 Finals Night of the UPD Engineering Marketing Congress, an event dominated by Industrial Engineering majors. I tell you, it is hard to convince a geriatric judge how wonderful an intangible product (i.e. technological service) is when your opponents are marketing soaps, gasoline, and tea. Ia Lucero and I presented S^infinity, in addition to writing the 18-page marketing plan.

But still, Team Rijndael disproved the theory that Computer Science majors are tongue-tied geeks who know how to program their software but not to market them. (We were the only Computer Science team in a field of seven finalists.) As consolation, we bagged the Best Exhibit award.

As mentioned, S^infinity is a commercial service; “brand name” would be an appropriate description. It runs on top of HAMSTER, which is the Team’s thesis itself.

FYI, Ia designed both the S^infinity and HAMSTER logos. Presently, Team Rijndael is in the thick of things at the PESO Challenge, a technology and innovation business plan competition modeled after the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition. It is being held by the Philippine Center for Entrepreneurship and the Ayala Foundation. S^infinity is one of the 37 ‘companies’ (pruned from 72) that made it through the first round. Again, I was Team’s business plan writer. Talk about having a stereotype job, haha.

I’ll be posting on our experiences regarding the first PESO Participant Enhancement Workshops in a few days. Wish us luck!

The UP Parser, Official Student Publication of UP Diliman’s Department of Computer Science, has released its first issue for the academic year. Original release date was set in mid-August, but due to circumstances beyond our control, release was pushed back to September 15, 2005.

Apologies for the delay, but hey, we believe it was worth the wait. Eight hundred full-color copies, with a free MMORPG CD to boot! This is Parser Showtime, ladies and gentlemen.

You can view the online version here. For the PDF version, you can email us or drop a comment below.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A. M. Turing Award Lecture titled “Assessing the Internet: Lessons Learned, Strategies for Evolution, and Future Possibilities” was held at the University of Pennsylvania last August 22, 6PM Eastern Standard time, and was webcast live to various gatherings of geeks and geekettes all over the world.

For the Philippines, local chapter UP ACM paid gracious host to the historic event at the College of Engineering Theater, University of the Philippines - Diliman, on August 23, 6 to 7:50AM Philippine time. UP ACM members and UP Diliman Department of Computer Science faculty were in attendance.

After Eduardo Glandt, Dean of UPenn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, kicked off the event, ACM President David Patterson gave an overview of ACM, its distinguished history, its stature as the world’s first and largest society for computing, and the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”, the A.M. Turing Award.

Patterson then wasted no time in introducing the night’s main attractions — Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, recipients of the 2004 A.M. Turing Award and developers of the TCP/IP architecture, which basically allows the existence of the Internet and should be showered by ‘hallelujahs’ from Net addicts the world over.

“Vint” Cerf and “Bob” Kahn presented their lecture as what most (lay)men would call a “geeky” chat (I’d prefer “intellectual” conversation) between them, with ACM SIGCOMM Chairman Lyman Chapin moderating the talk. The wizardly duo proved to be engaging speakers, displaying the wit which absolutely made the lecture a lot lot more entertaining than I believe it should’ve been. (After all, academic lectures are meant to inform, not entertain.)

Several key points in the lecture which this relatively computer networks neophyte found to be interesting:

* Layering, while a very effective implementation strategy, isn’t exactly a fundamental requirement for networks. Also, the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) architecture’s distinct lack of an Internet layer was mentioned by the speakers. Ah, the good ol’ OSI vs. TCP/IP match-up…

* The end-to-end nature of TCP/IP spawned a lot of creativity. It allowed P2P connections, for example, to flourish, because the two endpoints need only to know what the heck they’re trying to accomplish, never mind the medium between them. Cerf also touched on his idea of “the Edge” of the Net.

* SIGCOMM Chair Chapin broached the idea that innovation can spawn from any point, whether it’s from “the Edge” or from different interfaces.

* The environment/structure of the Internet today doesn’t allow for a big architectural change to occur, unlike the research environment of the past (uh, sandbox mode, anyone?). Nowadays it isn’t the logical structure of the Net which is being thoroughly understood by people — it’s the business models.

* Cerf and Kahn were one in stating their idea of “creeping incrementalism”; the Internet is incrementally evolvable and improvable. Kahn also expressed his belief that even incremental change can be very hard to attain in a distributed system. The mobile nature of today’s networks were also contrasted against the fixed terminals of the old, thus illustrating the need for file persistence.

* Kahn gave an analogy with Physics: like in Computer Science, the Physics timeline has key points where major upheavals had occured. The good ideas behind these upheavals not only needed to be damn good, but were strongly backed up by credibility.

* Other trains of thought were on “uniqueness and commonality”, and interplanetary Internet (oh yeah, baby).

After a standing ovation signified the end of the lecture, an open forum took place. Several interesting points raised:

* After being asked, “Is there a way to shut down the Internet?” (analogous to the emergency situation of shutting down a nuclear power plant going critical), Kahn responded that we have no compelling reason to suddenly put the entire Net in the freezer. Not his exact words, but you get my drift.

* The speakers expressed their belief that the “Everything is connected!” nature of the Net works both ways — it has a good side and a bad side. The latter rears its ugly head when organizations want to isolate parts of their own networks from the whole (e.g. internal networks). This is one of the driving reasons for the proliferation of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

* Kahn issued a challenge to the audience: Throw away the basics of Computer Science (yes, those early stuff you get to learn in BS CS). Can you identify the really major ideas that have popped out in the recent roll of years?

A second (and well-deserved) standing ovation marked the lecture’s conclusion, with everybody ending up a lot more geeky and brighter. Count me in as one of those guys. Truly, an informative session.

And of course, UP ACM didn’t fail to take care of its ranks, providing free food delivered hot straight from Jollibee. Boo-yeah!

Here’s one looking forward to the next ACM Webcast!

[Watch out for a possible re-run of the Turing Lecture Webcast (recorded) in the upcoming Gee!CS event of the Department this September 14, 2005.]