Every year, the institute recognizes outstanding Special Problems of deserving students for their creativity and innovation. The Special Problem is the equivalent of a thesis wherein the student formulates a problem and develops a software solution to solve it. Unlike a thesis which has a theoretical approach to problem solving, the Special Problem is application-centric. Nominated Special Problems are evaluated based on algorithm and system design, originality of the approach, significance of the problem, and usefulness of the solution.

This year's nominees for Best SP are the following (with links to the final paper):

• A Line Tracker for Automated Guided Vehicles (Quinones, Enrico Benedict)
• Actor-driven Facial Animation using Blendshape Interpolation (Tagle, John Mark;Villaluna, Tyrone)
• Automatic Egg Grading System Using Image Processing and Committee Machines (Zarsuela, Allan)
• Automated Part of Speech Tagger for Tagalog Texts (dela Paz, Maria Blessilda)
• Cluster Analysis in Text Retrieval Systems (Pascua, Michael)
• Enterprise Content Management System (Ong Nyl Bryan)
• Image Noise Reduction Using Cellular Automata (Guieb, Eleni)
• NetTrace: Information Visualization of a website using Quasi-Hierarchical Graphs in 3D-Hyperbolic Space (Monserat Toni Jan Keith)
• SPy : Location-Aware Algorithm for Counting Objects in a Road Traffic System (Yap, Jew Jason;Yu, Siena)
• Tangible User Interface for Augmented Reality Tangible User Interface for Augmented Reality Tabletop Strategy Games (Gabinete, Dale Mark)
• UPLB Live: A Pre-Configured Linux-based LIVE CD for the UPLB Intranet (Abilay, Wilford;Rara, Israel;Sebastian, Neal Irwin)