A 16-YEAR-OLD Filipino student in California has created a website that tracks and documents public infrastructure projects and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to evaluate construction quality. Gian Alingog, a Computer Science major at the University of California-Sta. Barbara, told The Manila Times in an exclusive interview that envisions his website, the Ovovtec, or One Village, One Volunteer: Trained, Educated, and Community-Centered, Concerned Citizen Confronting Corruption in Construction, to empower more people in monitoring government construction projects in their own communities. Alingog has been a computer programmer since he was 11, was a silver medalist in the National Olympiad in Informatics (NOI) competition in 2025, and a computer science awardee from the Ateneo High School in 2023. He said he discussed with his father, Glovax founder Giovanni Alingog, the country’s flood control projects scandal. “I thought to myself that as a computer science student, I was thinking of something to contribute to solve this problem, so I thought, why don’t I just make a platform which can help give information without government control,” Alingog said. “We can collaborate with other Filipinos, they can serve the country [through my application] and that is what I want to see, that we are involved in this,” he said. “Volunteer experts” post pictures and videos of projects on Ovovtec.org, and determine if the projects are “up to standard,” “substandard” or a “ghost” project. Members of the Ovovtec community can either “like or dislike” or make a comment on the analysis made by the volunteer experts. “It is in the hands of the people to ensure that public funds and projects are done right, and these projects are being seen by all, so what we do at Ovovtech is a youth-led citizen-focused organization by the people for the people whose main focus is to document these public construction projects,” Alingog said. In the long run, these posts will be fed through an artificial intelligence large language model that would automatically evaluate construction quality, with the goal of making AI determine if the construction project meets standards or show red flags. “Our vision for the future is to make the process easy to analyze whether this project is okay, and integrate it with artificial intelligence. Our plan is to recruit many people so we can have more data,” he said. Alingog is open to collaborating with Philippine government agencies to help fight corruption, and hopes to expand the program to other Third World countries who are confronted with the same problem.