Cebu IT student Emerge Champion in National Open-Source Challenge
by: V. Saguin
A team of three IT students and coach from Cebu Institute of Technology bagged the top prize and earned for themselves and the institution the title, Country’s Champion, during the Sun Microsystem’s national Open Jive Challenge ’09. The event was held at the Technological Institute of the Philippines, Quezon City on July 18, 2009.
CIT College of Computer Studies students Joshua Verano, Jomarck Aldave and Israel Sato, together with their coach and IT Department Chair Larmie Feliscuzo, bested 112 other finalist teams form different schools in the country to win in what is considered as the most prestigious open-source technologies competition in Asia.
In addition, they won a US$1,000 check, three $320 Sun Microsystem certification vouchers, and four Samsung GTS 2335 smartphones.
Their submission, entitled ‘Generic Spellchecker: An Open Office Extension’ impressed the judges because of its practicability and simplicity.
“Creating extensions for existing applications can be tricky since the parameters have already been set by the original programmers so the challenge is to work around these and make the application even better by adding extensions. So this might be the reason why it is not often looked into or thought about as a project,” explains Coach Santos-Feliscuzo.
“It’s also unique because it incorporated the local languages in checking the validity and/or existence of words. We used a linguistic corpus that’s been used by language researchers as data”, adds Verano.
CIT bested the teams from other top-caliber universities such as the Manila Central University, Silliman University, Technological Institute of the Philippines- Manila, University of Immaculate Concepcion, University of the Philippines- Diliman and University of San Jose- Recoletos. In addition, they are slotted to represent the Philippines in the Asian Grand Finals in Singapore on July 2009.
Open Jive, organized by Sun Microsystems, and partnered regionally by Elixir Technology and locally by Philippine Society of I.T. Educators (PSITE), is one of the Asian region’s most prestigious competition of open-source software development. The winning team of the regional grand championship in Singapore will be awarded US$3,000, four Macbook Pro laptops, and a free trip to the nest Sun Developer event held in the region. This year marks the Philippines’ and Indonesia’s entry to the competition, joining Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore who have had this competition for several years.
The objective of Open Jive Challenge is to use Open Source technologies such as Java™ technology, Open Solaris™, NetBeans™ IDE, MySQL™ and many others to develop Web 2.0 solutions which consequently hope to address global key issues while fostering interaction between communities on the internet.
Originally Posted by keroberose
proud to be a Technologian alumni nako hehhe
Wahaha. However, mas nice gyud kung ma center of development for engineering ang CIT. Then center of excellence in engineering dayun after 4 years.. wohoooo! 
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