2 Phl teams advance to Trend Micro programming contest finals

MANILA, Philippines - Trend Micro Inc., a global leader in cloud security, has announced the top 10 finalists for its 2014 Codinsanity Asia-Pacific Programming Contest.

For the first time in its history, the contest was opened to students as well as working professionals in 12 regions around Asia, attracting a record high of 422 teams.

Trend Micro will be sending the 10 best teams from Taiwan, Japan, China, and the Philippines to Taiwan for the grand finals.

The finalists include eight student teams (two from Taiwan, three from Japan, two from China, and one from the Philippines) and two working professional teams (one from China and one from the Philippines).

Outlasting four rounds of preliminary online contests, the Philippines will be making its second consecutive appearance with two teams getting into the Trend Micro contest finals.

Team UPPG 1 is composed of University of the Philippines Diliman students Jose Berba, Williard Jose, Marco Karaan, and Adrian Vidaal, while Team Liadri is represented by Kalibrr working professionals Tim Dumol, Joan Magno, Kevin Atienza, and John Ayson.

Both teams will proudly don the country’s colors in the competition’s final stage from Aug. 16 to 19 to compete for the grand trophy.

As big data adoption enters into the mainstream, gaining insights from big data has become the latest trend of the cloud era. This year, the contest will challenge participants with big data problems, and the contestants need to write the most efficient yet correct code to explore new solutions to enhance data correlation, and to demonstrate their innovative ideas.

“At Trend Micro, we are committed to fostering global software talents,” said Jenny Chang, chief culture officer and co-founder. “Through the platform of international programming contests, we are sharing the real-world experience of Trend Micro’s R&D teams around the world with the contestants, in the hope to encourage more young talent across Asia to join the software industry”

“As we have observed, software development has become an important and rising power of the Asia-Pacific region. Therefore, we have initiated this activity to enhance the ability of Asia-Pacific professionals in solving big data problems, while offering a global arena for contestants to compete and learn from each other to improve software development capabilities around the world,” Chang added.

This year, the contest has been expanded to 12 regions, including Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, and the Philippines.

The final contest will focus on the ability to solve big data problems. The test problem will be announced at the event and will test the ability of the finalists to innovate, execute, engineer, and present.

The contest offers a total of $50,000 in prizes. The overall champion will receive $20,000, while the first and second runner-ups will receive $10,000 and $6,000, respectively.

The champion student team will also be offered a unique chance of a two-month internship at Trend Micro Taiwan, Japan or China.

For more information on the Trend Micro 2014 Codinsanity Asia Pacific Programming Contest, visit http://contest.trendmicro.com/2014/.