The Student Conference 2007: “Building the Culture of Research” was hosted and organized by the Web.IT Organization. It was an activity during the college week of FEU - East Asia College.

The presenters during the conference were groups of students from CS and IT department who were included in the best projects during their Application Project 2 for CS students or Web Project for IT students. There were 6 six groups who presented in the conference wherein 3 of them were from the Computer Science department and the other 3 were from the Information Technology department. These are the ExPro, Web Monsters, D’ Company, Cubic-L, the Triad and Team i-DUTY group.

Our group - Web Monsters was one of the presenters during the event. We presented our system which is the Integrated Library System from its overview up to the system demonstration. Other groups also presented their system. And there were many attendees in the conference which includes student from CS and IT department, 2nd year to 4th year, and even students from the FEU Main.

The conference was ended with a closing remark given by Dr. May Rose Imperial - the Assistant to the Director for Academics.

The conference was very neat and organized. I can say that it was successful though there were still things needed to be improved. Hence, it was a great achievement for the Web.IT Organization.

The UP ITTC also offers seminars and short courses on current technologies, special topics, and trends. Several of these courses are trainings and lectures about Java Programming, Gaming, Blogging, Photography, about Electronic Mails, Networking and others.

Yesterday’s seminar was held at the UP Film Institute, Diliman Campus. It started at around 10:00AM and ended at 6:00PM. Honestly, there were times during the seminar that I really felt asleep. Aside from the fact that I already knew the coverage of the lecture, it was very boring. So there were lectures that I had not heard.

The first lecture was about Java Programming that discussed the basic concept of Java. During this lecture, I slept.

The second lecture that I could remember was Blogging which discussed tips on how bloggers earned money through their blogs. The used of different advertisements to gained revenue were explained. One is the Google Adsense. I already knew it so again I didn’t enjoy very much.

Next was the Digital Photography discussed by Dominque James, he talked about the hardware and software used by his studio. The lecture about digital photography was cool. Dominique James’ studio uses Mac OS-based PCs in managing their photos. Aside from learning the real power of Mac OS X, I also discovered a new software which is the Aperture. Like Adobe Photoshop, Aperture is used in editing graphics and images.

Furthermore, the seminar also discussed lectures about animation. Our speaker, I forgot the name, was a professor at De La Salle University - College of Saint Benilde. He presented some of the works of his students and they were good. The use of 3D maker software such as Maya and 3ds Max were discussed. But Macromedia Flash was not introduced. Only animation through movies where discussed and not on vector graphic animations.

Another lecture that I could recall was the Email Security. The speaker on this lecture was a former student at FEU - East Asia College who is now working at Trend Micro. This was the very last topic but we were so much alive because of our gratefulness that one of the lecturers was indeed our schoolmate. This topic discussed about malicious software and several kinds of virus attacks. It was enjoyable.

Lastly, the last lecture that I would never forget was the introduction of Microsoft’s Windows Vista. Just like in the launching held at SM Mall of Asia, same things were presented. But I was disappointed to the speaker when I asked him demonstrate the very intriguing feature of Vista which the Voice Recognition. He had many alibis.

Still, even though some of the lectures were already introduced to us at school - FEU - East Asia College, there were still facts that I had discovered. Anyway, I cannot blame them because the seminar during the first day was really intended for High School students.

We were “sabits”…