A PHILIPPINE team composed of information technology (IT) and business enthusiasts has won in Southeast Asia’s (SEA) Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) Online Hackdays 2020, an IT-Business Idea Solution Competition participated in by more than 2,300 participants across the SEA region.
Team SYMBlot’s winning project is an artificial intelligence (AI)-based integrated business solution that aims to address the profitability issues facing a community of seaweed farmers.
The group was also announced as winners first in the preliminary level among 488 participants in the Philippines before entering the championship level participated in by other countries in Southeast Asia.
“The Sustainable World Augmented by Robust Machines (Swarm) was our first entry to the preliminary competition. It is an Internet of Things (IoT) device that gathers information about the sea (i.e. salinity level, turbidity, light intensity) and predicts the occurrence of seaweed diseases,” Reinier Veral, a research and development engineer, IOT and machine learning expert from Manila, said.
The team, composed of Veral, a former professor of Mapua University; Casey Jon Chua, a specification engineer from Manila; Jeremiah Valero Jr., a web and AI enthusiast and an alumnus of the University of San Carlos (USC); and Ivy Jumao-as, a business and marketing educator, researcher and faculty member of USC; won US$2,000 during the preliminary level.
Moving to the next round, the team unveiled Seaweed Profitability Advancement Workflow Network (Spawn), an AI-based system that aims to provide seaweed farmers profit optimization-centered assistance from production to marketing of their produce.
“This is the project we championed in the Southeast Asia competition,” said Jumao-as, adding that the team won $20,000 for the final round.
Jumao-as, in an interview, revealed that an international non-government organization is already expressing funding support for the product’s prototyping, among others.
“Although this competition was our personal endeavor to exploit opportunities and increase our resiliency to survive and go beyond this coronavirus pandemic, we were also grabbing this rare chance to represent our country in this big-scale competition. This is a way to encourage potential entrepreneurs like us to take intentional steps, small they may be, to exploit opportunities even in this pandemic,” she said.
While the pandemic has caused everything to be done virtually, Chua said this did not stop them.
“Two members of the team are from Manila while the other two are from Cebu. Despite that, we were still able to collaborate our ideas coming from our various expertises to contribute to the creation of a successful project,” he said.
Valero said winning the competition felt surreal.
“Winning the competition despite going against formidable and intelligent teams was something that I wasn’t expecting. In a time where the world was and is continuing to battle a pandemic, the competition was very relevant in that it showcased how the world will continue to innovate and solve problems,” he said.