12 February 2015
Advancing earlier on into the finals round, the PLM team was selected for a special award in the 11th SWEEP Innovation and Excellence Awards held tonight in Makati City.
Riding on the impact of solving one of the pernicious woes of city living, said Team germinated an idea of easing out the anguish of the riding public through a cloud-based mobile application. Dubbed as Smart Reserve, a user avails of an electronic reservation for a bus in transit with a real-time GPS map monitoring of the bus location. One receives a notification alert shortly before the bus approaches and boards it by presenting the E-Ticket. Primarily targeting the city bus routes but applies similarly to provincial franchises, the convenience that the mobile application provides intends to entice the car owners to also avail of public mass transit which offshoots to the reduction of cars plying the major city roads.
Three (3) special awards were given to teams whose entries satisfy the criteria set by the Smart Developer Network, the telco's developer community program. PLM's entry got the nod of the major sponsor and was adjudged as Ericcson Networked Society awardee, with the highest stake of PhP 50,000. The PLM Team, led by senior Computer Engineering scholar Gabriel Justin Dimailig, also bagged PhP 30,000 as a finalist. Along with seven (7) other members, the team received mentorship from its faculty adviser, engineer Eufemia Garcia, and assigned Smart engineers.
The mobile application competition has opened in September 2014 with a series of screening rounds and culminated five (5) months after.
The Awards night was preceded by a Leadership Summit for school administrators on the latest technology innovations and current global events that impact the country's educational system.
Seeking to improve the level of IT and engineering education in the Philippines, the Smart Wireless Engineering Education Program (SWEEP) is Smart's industry-academe partnership program with select universities across the country, including PLM.
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