A team of three students from STI Tagaytay emerged as second runner-up in the Huawei Developer Competition held last Nov. 18 in Dongguan, China.
Jet Maquiling, Dan Angelo Torrecampo, and Carlo Gabriel Ledesma of STI Team IC stood out among hundreds of finalists, marking a historic milestone as the first Filipino team to reach the prestigious stage in the competition.
Maquiling was also among the students chosen to be one of the Huawei Cloud Campus Ambassadors.
The STI students received a cash prize amounting to $3,000, a plaque, and medals from Huawei Cloud Asia-Pacific, as well as Huawei MatePad and a plaque each from Huawei Cloud Philippines.
The Huawei Developer Competition is the flagship event of Huawei Cloud for ICT development that focuses on encouraging developers to solve real-world challenges through the innovative application of cutting-edge technologies.
With Huawei Cloud technology as the backbone of their development, the team developed an online application designed to help users to communicate effectively, utilizing computer vision, machine learning, and professional insights in order to be able to accurately provide feedback.
Asked about the inspiration behind the idea, Ledesma said their project was driven by the desire to “develop an application that could further enhance the teachers, students, job interviewees — their skills in speaking in general, to be improved so that they may deliver their message to the world, effectively.”
He added that he was also inspired by his fellow students who are struggling to communicate confidently.
“Technical skills are something that can be improved by oneself just by watching videos or learning on his own, but most people do not know that the soft skills, or communication skills are the basic skills that students, or even teachers, or even professionals are having a hard time improving because you need an audience to practice to, and I think 9 out of 10 skills needed by the industry are soft skills. That’s where the idea came from,” Peña, the team’s adviser, said.
Team STI also extended its appreciation to Huawei Cloud Philippines for providing their support to develop the app from Day 1.
“Every year, we produce about 2,000 students taking certification courses from Huawei in helping develop ICT talents in the Philippines. Huawei has been our partner in cultivating our students’ talents as we all know that the Philippines is struggling in terms of ICT infrastructure and with Huawei’s help, our students are confident to join the ICT workforce in the country,” Peña added.
“We’re looking forward to have more and more younger talents to leverage on their capabilities, talents together to really contribute to the local market to make technology not only a mere technology, but contributes to the improvement of everyone’s life, in the near future for the Philippines,” said Sylvia Wang, president of Huawei Cloud Philippines.
