Three Filipino Finalist in Kaspersky Lab APAC & MEA Cup 2013

Three outstanding Filipino programmers and developers were named as finalist of the Kaspersky Lab Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa Cup 2013. They became part of the elite top 15 regional finalists in the competition to be held at the National University of Singapore from March 21-23, 2013. The three Filipinos who will represent the Philippines were identified as Ivan Dominic Baguio and John Ultra, both from University of the Philppines (UP) and Marvin Rey Garcia from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP). The three Filipinos were team leaders of their respective group's research papers. Baguio and his co-author John Carlo Florencio came up with the paper titled “On-the-fly Encryption for Android Devices,” which hopes to address limitations of Android devices in encrypting disks or external memory in real time. Garcia’s paper with his teammates Hannah Roselle Chan, Christopher Celestial and Arc Ezekiel Mercolesia is titled “Integration of Virtual Private Network in a Secured Smart Home Electricity Management System,” which proposes a solution to control household electricity. Ultra was only solo in three Filipinos, with his research paper titled “A Collaborative Access Control Model for E-Voting Systems.” He proposes a new method for modeling and enforcing separation of duty (SoD) in computer system like the one used in electronic system (e-voting). The Philippines made it to the regional finals for the second consecutive year. Last year the Philippines were represented by Joshua Arvin Lat and groupmates Rod Bondoc and Kevin Atienza from UP-Diliman. They were shortlisted for the APAC and MEA round. The group eventually won the first prize for their paper on a secure online USB login system during the final round of the Kaspersky Lab International Conference held in the Netherlands. The 2013 Theme for the Kaspersky Lab is "Cybersecurity for the Next Generation," the student conference aims to encourage research into information security across related fields to push the boundaries of knowledge and academic study into application with research papers by undergraduate to post-graduate students. The competition in Singapore is one of the five regional rounds of Kaspersky Lab's global annual conference, a collaborative environment where students, experts, scientists and researchers from different institutions around the world will discuss the key concerns related to cybercrime and cybersecurity. The winners of Kaspersky Lab will win a cash prize amounting to $1,000, $750 and $500 for the top three places. The winners will gain exposure at the international level. The top three best papers from the Singapore round will represent the region and compete against other regional powerhouse qualifiers from America, Europe, Russia and Commonwealth of Independent States at the final round. The finals will be held at the Royal Holloway,University of London in UK this coming June 2013.