Brunei introduces new scoring system for APICTA

0

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN: In what will be a milestone towards developing solutions catered towards both domestic and global markets of the IT industry Brunei Darussalam looks set to introduce a new and enhanced locally-designed and developed scoring system to be standardised by judges in the assessment of participants’ presentations in the Asia-Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA) 2012, which is being hosted by the country and begins today at The Empire Hotel & Country Club, Borneo Bulletin reported.

“This year we have decided to start from scratch to develop a scoring system based on the work flow of APICTA using all these letters, tools and features within the scoring system,” said Dr Yong Chee Tuan, Chief Judge of APICTA 2012, in an interview with the Bulletin.

The enhancement to the scoring system is driven by a process of work flow, which relates to the affordability of individual judges to make due adjustments in resolutions and feedbacks on the presentation of participants.

“One of the features that you can’t find in previous scoring systems is the function ‘Suspend’, which means if you score halfway or you want to have a break, you (the judges) can press the button so that the other judges would not be able to do anything. The judge can submit a point and at the same time, if they find out they have pressed wrongly, the head judge can overturn that. We have developed the user requirements,” he said.

The additional features of the scoring system also include allowing judges to provide feedbacks directly to the participants without compromising the change of scores from their colleagues.

“Some judges may want to provide feedback to participants such as commenting on how nice if they can make the graphics larger in size, make their voice louder or to present clearer. These are things that you don’t want to say in front of the other judges because you may influence people scoring by directly saying it to the participants,” Dr Yong said.

“What we have also introduced is that the head judge can see the bias, can see the fluctuations because in judging, situations in certain spikes of scoring may exist. This information is made transparent to the chief judge and this year we allow the chief judge to have an overview of everything that is happening and provide some interventions. If we see some scores are not moving or not entering, we suspect something is happening,” he added.

“We had a trial period and we let the international judges try it out. We received comments for improvements and Alhamdulillah we have the final solution,” said Haji Abdul Rahim bin Derus, Director of ICT at the Ministry of Education, also a key figure of the initiative.

Haji Abdul Rahim also said that such an approach will significantly raise the standards in terms of software development, using our own system that will give Brunei an edge as a country to come up with solutions critical for the industry.

Dr Yong believed that Brunei’s advancement in recent years means that they could also be considered on par with other countries that could be considered as the early adopters, despite at one stage, being viewed, in previous models, as a “laggard” in the industry.

“We have a complete real-time judging system when the scoring and entering takes place. We’re making use of the latest technology in Cloud computing and real-time scoring system. From the many perspectives, it is the projection for Brunei to showcase we are among the players and we are in competition and although it is a small market, it is awry young country for IT technology. Advances such as these help garner the confidence of IT players and industry as they will feel that there is recognition, there is an avenue and there is a direction,” added Dr Yong.

It is a very fluctuating and new industry, he said, and with support from the government, it sets forth the direction for the IT players in the country

The 17 categories for the competition comprise e-Government, e-Learning, Secondary Student Project, Tertiary Student Project, Tourism and Hospitality, Media and Entertainment, Communication, Financial Services, Industry Application, Industrial Application, e-Logistic and Supply Chain Management, Security, Tools and Infrastructure Application, Research and Development, e- Health, Start Up Company, e-Inclusion, e-Community and Sustainability and Green IT.