The paper entitled LabGIS: A Real Estate Property Geographical Information System (GIS) for Local Government Units was awarded the best paper in the NCITE 2017, Information Systems Track. The paper was co-authored by Danilo J. Mercado and Jaime M. Samaniego.

Institute of Computer Science conducted a seminar-workshop on  computer and networks security and drone modelling held at Calubcub Bay Resort, San Juan, Batangas last June 17.

The training aims to equip the faculty members with basic knowledge on computer security and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). These two courses will be offered by the institute for the coming semesters and will need instructors capable of teaching the course using hands-on exercises.

Prof. Joseph Hermocilla, together with his Systems and Research Group (SRG), spearheaded the first part of the workshop. They demonstrated how malwares exploit the buffer of a computer. An exercise was given after the discussion.

Subsequently, Prof. Danilo Mercado tackled the main parts of an unmanned aerial vehicle or drone. He shared how different sensors can be attached to it to gather relevant data. He concluded his talk with the future research topics on drone modelling and programming. (by Donnalyn Drio)

Marie Betel B. de Robles will be joining SRG starting June 2017. Her research will focus on Computer and Network Security. She currently teaches Introduction to Computer Science and Software Engineering courses at the institute.

The course will be offered during the First Semester AY 2017-2018 as a Special Topics (CMSC 191) course. Computer systems process and store information that must be protected from unauthorized access and use. The ubiquity of the Internet further amplified the security threats to these systems. This course aims to equip students with the knowledge and skills in identifying threats and vulnerabilities, and developing protection mechanisms for these systems. As there is a growing demand for security specialists in various industries, this course will help the students be introduced to the basic skills required for successful careers in cyber security. Eventually, this is will be an elective course (CMSC 138) for students taking the BSCS degree. The course will cover theoretical and practical aspects of security.

Niño is currently a backend developer at Hackarus, a startup company based in Japan. His undergraduate Special Problem is about data gravity.

The paper entitled SkyLab: An extensible workflow web application for HPC on the cloud was accepted for oral presentation in the 17th Philippine Computing Science Congress (PCSC 2017) on March 16-18, 2017 at the University of San Carlos, Talamban Campus, Cebu City, Philippines.

The paper is authored by Vincent Paul L. Carpio, Katrina Joy M. Abriol-Santos, and Joseph Anthony C. Hermocilla. Vincent recently completed BS Computer Science from UPLB.

The paper entitled BERTUD: Building Footprint Extraction and Regularization in LiDAR Datasets Through Utilization of a Distributed System was accepted for oral presentation in the 37th Asian Conference of Remote Sensing (ACRS 2016) on October 17-21, 2016 at the Galadari Hotel, Colombo 1, Sri Lanka.

The paper is authored by Ivan Marc H. Escamos and co-authored by Allen Roy C. Roberto, Edwin R. Abucay, Gillian Katherine L. Inciong , Miyah D. Queliste, and Joseph Anthony C. Hermocilla. Miyah and Joseph are part of a collaboration with the UPLB Phil-LiDAR project.