Budding computer engineers and software developers from the Technological Institute of the Philippines (T.I.P.) emerged among the Top 35 Global Finalists in the 2022 NASA Space Apps Challenge.

The students worked on a solution for measuring open science which seeks to broaden public access to several scientific studies and statistics being published on the internet through user-friendly information and communication-related technologies for the benefit of society.

Team Loominaries composed of junior college students Neal Barton James Matira, Jeremy Reuel Cesista, Carlo Dominique Tolin, and Jomari Dungque proposed a web application that guides people in sifting through thousands of scientific research available online.

The group called their project “RE:SCORE” which was designed to measure the reproducibility index of a particular study by gauging peer evaluations, expert reviews, public reactions, and opinions towards it through sentiment analysis.

“‘RE:SCORE’ is an app that aims to give a credibility score towards open science materials for people to see their relevance as well as the actual validity and reliability of the research in accordance with its existing metrics,” said Matira, the team leader.

Cesista, who served as a backend developer in the project, said they tried to incorporate carefully programmed algorithms into the app to ensure that it would yield trustworthy results when users key in the digital object identifier (DOI) of the research in question.

“We took into account the reviews of random people on social media, as well as those of the experts, and included other metrics such as the number of citations this research had in other research to determine which has the best score,” he added.

Team member Dungque, a chemical engineering major from T.I.P. Manila, noted that their project is still a “work in progress but it has potential.”

“I just hope that it will go beyond open space applications and can be used in other fields,” Dungque said.

Meanwhile, another team called T.I.P. Warriors also participated in the 2022 NASA Space Apps Challenge and made it to the list of Global Nominees.

The group won the Local People’s Choice citation in the Manila event of the global hackathon.

T.I.P. Warriors engaged in the “Learning Through the Looking Glass” challenge and created a relatively simple game called “Telescope Hunter,” featuring NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that encouraged more people to know about it.

Jerico delos Reyes, the team leader, worked with his fellow junior computer engineering students–Andrea Faith Alimorong, Christian Ainsley del Rosario, Zherish Galvin Mayordo, and Jesriel John Sarambao–in developing the app that allows players to hunt parts of the JWST.

“What I learned in this competition is that trying is better than failure because, to be honest, we were not sure if we would succeed... This is our first time joining this kind of competition and we were glad and proud of ourselves that (our efforts) were acknowledged,” Delos Reyes said.

The International Space Apps Challenge is an annual global hackathon organized by the US-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through its Earth Science Division in collaboration with other partner firms.

The 2022 NASA Space Apps Challenge was held in October 2022 with the theme “Make SPACE.”

As stated on its website, the challenge reached a record-breaking 31,561 registered participants from 162 countries last year --- making it the largest Space Apps Challenge, to date.