Pinoy Programmer – Chosen as 12 Finalist

Check the site and vote for this guy.
http://www.madeinexpress.com/
Filipino reaches finals of international programming tilt By Alexander VillafaniaINQ7.netLast updated 11:41pm (Mla time) 08/19/2006

There were 1,500 entries and only 12 were chosen as finalists in the Made in Express (MIE) contest — and one of them is a Filipino.
Twenty-seven year old programmer Sanchez Roman Canlas is among the Magic 12 contestants in the Microsoft-endorsed competition that pits the world’s best enthusiast and hobby programmers in Microsoft Visual Studio Express and Microsoft SQL Server Express (thus, the name “Made in Express”) platforms.
MEI is an annual competition and this year, they are dangling a cash prize of 10,000 US dollars for the grand winner. The first prize winner would take home 1,000 US dollars while the runners-up will each get 250 US dollars worth of Amazon.com gift certificates.
Canlas’ application is called “Dr House,” named after a famous medical TV series of the same name. It is a chat “bot” (an application with basic artificial intelligence) that works as a virtual psychotherapist analyzing a human subject’s reaction to questions.
“Dr. House” basically learns from the human subject and finds out his or her behavioral problems or character.
In an interview with INQ7.NET, Canlas said the application was developed using a mix of MS Visual Basic Web Developer Express, SQL Server 2005 Express, MS Agent Control 2.0 and Microsoft Speech Software Development Kit.
Canlas, who works as a lead programmer for Equitable-PCI Bank in Makati City, said Dr. House should work similar to a real therapist. It would verbally respond and analyze the subject’s situation and then give a corresponding reply.
Canlas said speech recognition development is a hobby but it is among the most rarely taken up programming subject among Filipino Microsoft developers.
“I find speech-enabled applications and speech recognition software fascinating because there are a lot of other projects that can be done using these. In particular, speech recognition could be used for the business process outsourcing industry,” Canlas said.
The competition started last March 31 and will end by September 1. Announcement of winners will be announced by September 19.
However, the 12 finalists have a chance to also win in the Community Choice category, which offers another 1,000 US dollar prize, as their projects could be selected by visitors through the MIE website (www.madeinexpress.com).
http://www.madeinexpress.com/