My YILF and BGSCC Experience
- 4 minsEver since joining the Ateneo Innovation Center, I became more passionate towards research. I grew an interest and appreciation in the field of information and communication technology (ICT) in particular. ICT is a field I’m quite familiar being trained as an electronics and communications engineer. I came to know and attend an international forum for young ICT enthusiasts like me.
I participated in the Young ICT Leaders’ Forum and the Busan Global Smart Cities Challenge last September 27-29, 2017 in Busan Metropolitan City, South Korea. I came to know about these events from my friend and colleague from the Ateneo Innovation Center, Harold Bolingot (BS CoE ’16 and ARSAN). He told me about this opportunity. He told me how he applied and got accepted to the forum both in 2015 and 2016, and how he was not able to attend due to unforeseen circumstances. So, I checked out the website and learned how it was indeed a good opportunity.
The Young ICT Leaders’ Forum is a platform for the Youth from worldwide to gather together in order to learn and to share ideas about ICT development and innovations. It is also a forum where they can pursue their career advancement and opportunities to realize their entrepreneurship through a network of professionals and experts as well as capacity building programme.
“Busan Global Smart Cities Challenge” is an open competition platform for young people to present their innovative ideas on harnessing the power of digital technologies in making a city smarter, safer, and friendlier to the environment, thereby improving the quality of life of the citizens.
The competing ideas should be relevant to the focusing topics of the forum:
- Building Smart Cities: transforming lives,
- AI/FinTech for Smart Cities,
- Iot and Security,
- CSRs and the SDGs
Based on the qualification and feasible ideas of applicants, ITU and Busan city will provide fellowships including round-trip air ticket, full accommodation, transportation and meals for full participation to the YILF. While all qualified participants fully participate in the YILF & Busan Global Smart Cities Challenge programme, four winners who have outstanding ideas will be awarded cash-prizes supported by forum sponsors.
So, I sent my application online. I chose to submit my idea under the first category, Building Smart Cities: transforming lives. The idea I chose to submit was my research about a the use of Near Cloud nodes as decision support system disaster resilience and risk reduction. This research is a major thrust of AIC. I have inherited past research on disaster science and mobile cloud technology from my AIC predecessors and am currently working with experienced researchers in this field.
After around two weeks, the results were out and I received my acceptance letter and invitation to the forum and the competition.
My feelings on the event itself
I was very overwhelmed. I was both excited and nervous. As for the talks in the forum, they were very interesting to me since they were quite innovative and relevant for the ICT research and industry. As for the competition itself, during the first day, we had to stand in front of the posters we made for ideas and present to everyone who roamed around and asked. It was quite scary because these were top ICT guys and entrepreneurs who roamed around. For the second day, I was nervous. We were assigned to our specific schedule and I was assigned to be the second to present after lunch and tenth overall. There were talks first before the idea presentations, I couldn’t focus on listening to them and the other delegates’ idea presentations even if they were super interesting because I was too occupied with how I was going to present especially seeing how everyone was quite good at pitching his/her idea. After I presented, I really felt relieved and grateful it was done.
Since it was something I can say my first major international forum and competition, I really felt the experience was surreal. I was extra lucky that the YILF was held in conjunction with the annual ITU Telecom World 2017 basically the world’s ICT “Olympics” an international platform for innovation showcasing, high-level debate, knowledge-sharing and networking for the governments, industry leaders, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and regulators that form part of the world’s ICT community. It was a young researcher’s dream come true.
My Takeaways
I guess there are too many to mention. I think one major takeaway I got from the experience is motivation. I am now more driven and inspired to do what I want to do which is do research and development. I got a glimpse of limitless possibilities for me from all the talks and ideas from the forum and competition. Another major takeaway would be more self confidence. Now, I am more confident to try out all possible applications. I no longer see applications as too ambitious for me. I just try them out because I strongly believe you would never know unless you try.