Geek Fest

The impending super typhoon Reming did not stop us from attending yesterday's opening sessions for the 7th National EECCE Conference. Our thesis, was presented by my groupmate Eugene, as it was a '1 of 4' candidate for the conference's best student paper. Our thesis, Dual Core Capability of a 32-Bit DLX Microprocessor, was pitted against the works of a UP EEE Phd student (his MS thesis), a UP EEE Professor on study leave for her Phd in Australia (also her MS thesis), and a group of La Salle students.

Ma'am Pedrasa eventually won the award for best paper. Since she was not around, the thesis was presented by her adviser, Dr. Festin - currently the department chair of UP Engineering's Computer Science Department. Her thesis talks about Value-based Utility for Jitter Management, a method used for QoS.

Even though our thesis did not win it, we were very honored to present that day. If only our rivals were not that 'big time' we should have won the competition :D. Judges were composed of a Phd professor from Ateneo, Richard Tyo (Principal Architect from Intel) and Mark Finn (Chief Product Engineer from Cypress Semiconductors). This gives us a thought that our thesis could have a chance in the upcoming University Research Competition.

This year's ECE Conference seemed to be more enjoyable as the presentors for the first day were very good and introduced interesting topics. I guess I enjoyed the event because I am now able to relate with what most of the speakers were talking about. Parallel sessions were moved to next week since typhoon was to be expected this weekend.

For that day, I was also able to sign some papers for a 1 week stint at ASTI where I would be an FPGA training seminar lab assistant. Elma actually would be the lecturer for the training. Usual rates for student assistants still apply so I won't be earning that much.
At least I get to do something worthwhile for now.