Road to MOTA

Tomorrow, we will have a meeting with Sir Borgz. It is not an ordinary meeting because it will not be in school. I think we will meet at Shangri La mall and talk about our Most Outstanding Thesis Award presentation.

I am excited for our MOTA presentation this Wednesday. We will try to market our thesis (Hotchpot) to some panelists. I really want to present our thesis alongside Ian, but too bad, only one must present it. He will have a keynote style speech for our Wednesday presentation.

Wish us luck! We are aiming for the Gold award. And I hope we can get it.

Hotchpot, anyone?

So what is this Hotchpot?

Hotchpot is a summarizer, a Facebook application, and a framework.

Hotchpot as a summarizer

Hotchpot is a summarizer for Senate bills in the Philippines. It summarizes them through extraction. It extracts the most important sentences in the explanatory note of the bill. It also uses several features to score and rank each sentences. These features include sentence length, sentence position, title, word frequency, and such. The top five sentences will be the summary and represent the whole bill. The summary that is created by Hotchpot is an indicative summary. It is not a replacement for the original bill. Instead, it is a short preview of it for readers will know what the bill is about. The summary is like the text at the back of a book. It does not intend to replace the book, but it is a sneak peek of what the book contains.

Hotchpot as a Facebook application

Hotchpot uses Facebook to disseminate. It is a disseminating tool for the Senate bills that were summarized. It also utilizes the Facebook API and its social graph. Through this application, the bills will be disseminated based from the interest of their users. The category of the bills will be matched to the interest of the Facebook users. Hotchpot enables people to easily access the Senate bills. In this application, people do not need to come to the bills, the bills will just come to them. The Facebook users can also vote for the bills if they like it or not. They can also comment and express their ideas about the bill. Hotchpot will increase the awareness of the people to what is happening in their government especially the Senate.

Hotchpot as a framework

Hotchpot is a framework for summarizing and disseminating. It is not just a summarizer specifically for Senate bills. It is a summarizer for any documents without any much changes. Only a few modification is needed for it to summarize other documents. Business articles are tested in Hotchpot and it works with a good result. Articles or documents that are summarized can then be also disseminated through Facebook. Interest of the users will be matched to the category of the documents. Through this framework, documents will be easier to read and accessed.

Hotchpot is a system that can do those said above. It is not just created to be use by the people. It is created to make a difference to the people, to the technology, and to the government.

To use Hotchpot, just go to this link.

Defense.

Yesterday is one of the biggest day of our thesis life. Thesis defense. Kami ang unang sumabak sa thesis defense battlefield. Halo-halong emosyon ang aming nararamdaman habang papalapit ang aming pag depensa. May kaba, takot, excitement, at marami pang ibang mga di mapaliwanag na pakiramdam.

Sa mga panahon na yun, kasalukuyan din kaming nag kacram. Gumagawa ng technical manual at user manual na hindi naman nagamit, at pati ang presentation na gagamitin namin.

May mga tanong din na umiikot sa aming isipan. Papasa ba kami? Kaya ba namin? Handa na ba kami?

Handa na nga ba kami?

We are ready for defense!

Di namin alam ang kakalabasan ng laban pero wala na kaming magagawa kundi harapin ito ng aming buong lakas at loob.

Last push.

We are now in the last part of our thesis. Having some last push. K. Thanks. Bye.

RH Bill summarized!

Well, the Reproductive Health bill is one of the issues being talked about today. The bill is introduced in the Senate by Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago and is called as Reproductive Health Act (Senate Bill No. 2378).

The bill can be read through this link, but I think you will not bother. It is because the bill is lengthy with 16 pages. And that's where our thesis will come in.

Did I mention before that our thesis aims to automatically summarize Senate bills? Yes it is. Our thesis basically shortens the Senate bills by extracting important information in there.

For example, the following is a summary extracted from the Reproductive Health Act:

• This bill compels the state to guarantee universal access to medically-safe legal affordable and quality reproductive health services methods devices supplies and relevant information thereon.
• However this bill does not dictate any form of population control.
• Finally this bill does not promote abortion.
• In fact this bill is "pro-life".
• Passage of this bill is a step towards the attainment of that constitutional guarantee.

Our thesis is not yet finished and still on going. Summarization algorithm is still being optimized. But as seen above, the extracted summary is pretty good. Expect a better summary after a while.

And that is just a part of our thesis. We will also disseminate the summarized bills through Facebook and utilized its social graph. Disseminating it through Facebook answers the question, "Why summarize it if no one will still able to read it?"

Well, in Facebook, the bills will be read.

Group hug before thesis defense like no other

We have the thesis signing like no other last November 3 and you can watch it here. Our thesis group is so cool that we also have a group hug before thesis defense like no other.

And you can watch it here.

We supposedly have our thesis defense last Friday, but it was rescheduled for today. Luckily, it went well. The verdict for us is CP or conditional pass, which is the best possible verdict that we can get. OH YEAH!

We recorded our thesis defense but it is so lengthy to upload.

For the MOTA!

Thesis signing like no other

The deadline for the submission of thesis documents was yesterday, November 3. And it is also yesterday when our adviser, Sir Borgz signed our document.

I first thought of taking a picture of the title page of our document. But on second thought, recording it is way better! So as a remembrance, we record it in a video and you can watch the memorable moment here.

Yes, our first thesis document is signed and ready for defense next week. Good luck to us!

By the way, you can watch it in 720p HD!

And lastly, the title page that was signed by Sir Borgz in the video is not the one that we submitted. We found a last minute error in the name of Excel and printed it again. Well, the signing of the new title page was not recorded because we are in the office.

For the MOTA!