The UP Parser

Savers Team Places 3rd, Sweeps Awards

By Tristan Jed Roque [tristanjed@gmail.com]

Three UP teams, all from the Department of Computer Science and dubbed as the UP Trinity, entered the national finals of the Trend Micro Tech Challenge (TMTC) 2005. From the 60 teams who submitted their entries out of 80 registered teams, only 10 competed in the three-day event last November 22-24, 2005 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Ortigas Center, Quezon City.

The UP Trinity was composed of the all-senior Team Vulcan and all-junior Team Savers, with Mr. TJ Vergel De Dios as coach. They developed the programs Spyder and SAVE (Spyware And Virus Exterminator) respectively. The other team was the all-senior Team UP Bibbo, who developed WASAVi (Windows Anti-Spyware Anti-Virus), with Prof. Susan Pancho-Festin and Mr. Sanjay Risbud as coaches. Team Savers did not fail in the Trinity’s quest to block the top three slots as they place 3rd over-all with P250,000 on hand. They also bested other teams as they became the runaway winner in Best Cheer-Presentation and Trend Micro’s first choice in exhibiting the Best Teamwork.

The TMTC is a nationwide competition open for the country’s college students of design, implementation and computer-based system testing. The TMTC 2005 competition consisted of solving different problems that simulate real-life activities and processes in setting up a network infrastructure protected from security threats along with this year’s theme “Network Protection Against Security Threats�.

The core challenge is to create an application that detects and cleans spyware using detection and cleanup information stored in an updatable pattern file package. It also includes a Web-based application that gathers logs from the installed client application and generates useful reports for a system administrator. A team must also create a standalone application that accepts detection and cleanup information for different spyware, and outputs a pattern file package.

The other seven finalists were sole teams from AMA Computer University, De La Salle University (Second Place), Mapua Institute of Technology, Mindanao State University – Iligan Institute of Technology (First Place), Rizal Technological University, University of San Jose – Recoletos and Xavier University – Ateneo de Cagayan. They received a Trend Micro Priority Application Certificate, which will highlight their application once they express their intention to join Trend Micro, the brainchild of PC-Cilin.