Philippine Computing Science Congress 2012 Report

I attended the recently concluded PCSC 2012 at De La Salle University - Canlubang last March 1-3, 2012. The conference site is available here. Although I did not submit any research paper in the conference, I decided to attend anyway just to get a feel of the state of computing science research in the Philippines.

There were two invited talks by professors from the National University of Singapore(NUS) and one from a researcher in US. The first invited talk was about the use of Graphics Processing Units to speed up computations in computational geometry. The second talk was about Support Vector Machines (SVM). The last was on Natural Language Processing (NLP).

This year, the conference featured "Turing Talks" to commemorate Allan Turing's 100th birth year. Distinguished professors from UPLB(Dr. Albacea), UPD(Dr. Caro), ADMU(Dr. Saldana), and DLSU(Dr. Azcarraga) delivered the talks.

The researches presented covered areas in Algorithms, Complexity Theory, Image Processing, NLP, and Information Systems.According to the program committee, there were 60 paper submissions but only a few were accepted for oral presentation. The best paper was Data Association for an Adaptive Multi-target Particle Filter Tracking System from ADMU.

Overall the conference was very nice. Regarding the state of computing research, there is still much to improve. Also, sad to, say my research area on systems is not well represented in the conference. The closest was a poster presentation from ADMU about location estimation based on the frames passed over a wireless network.

The best part of the conference, however,  was when I won a Lenovo from the raffle!