Projects

  • Institute of Philippine Culture, DOST-PCHRD, "eHaTID of LGUs - eHealth TABLET for Informed Decision-making of LGUs: Project 2: Deployment of eHealth TABLET with PCB system in Ten Provinces and Selected Municipalities Nationwide", funded by DOST- PCHRD, Jul 2014 - Jun 2016.  
  • Project Leader:  Ma. Regina E. Estuar, Ph.D.
The eHealth TABLET project was conceived with the aim of improving efficiency and transparency using an enhanced health information system (HIS) model that shall promote convergence among the stakeholders, to stimulate horizontal integration at the LGU level. Essentially, this project aims of bringing technology development closer to the local level. The process of consulting, observing, and understanding the work routine of the municipal health workers and providing them with regular inputs on the current status and design of the system ensures that the users will not be alienated from the technology we are developing. The eHealth Tablet system's proposed integration and interface with the PhilHealth PCB1 reporting and claims system will help streamline the LGU health financial transactions between the PHIC and the municipality's PHIC members. Consequently, the integration will also serve as a tool in monitoring the utilization of PhilHealth PCB 1 benefit packages by the municipality. Through this integration, LGU decision-making process for health financing and services delivery can improve its efficiency and program effectiveness for the benefit of their constituents.
  • Office of Civil Defense, Project NOAH, Manila Observatory, "Project eBAYANIHAN: A nationwide web - mobile based system for participatory disaster management (Project Code: 02656)", funded by PCIEERD, Jan 2014 - Jan 2016.  
  • Project Leader:  Ma. Regina E. Estuar, Ph.D.
The objective of this Project is to provide ordinary citizens with a web and mobile based application to report disaster experiences, including: overall status (vulnerability, exposure), needs, emotions, sentiments, opinion; to create a collection system that will harvest online disaster related information; to build, validate and test the reliability of a model for pattern and sentiment analysis of bilingual tweets using machine classification algorithms; to conduct pilot test in identified municipalities, and; to conduct training to OCD on the use of the web application and mobile applications.
  • UC Berkeley, "Cloud based Intelligent Plant Disease Mobile Detection System using Wireless Sensors and Microscopy", funded by Philippine California Research Institute - CHED, Oct 2013 - Dec 2016.  
  • Project Leader:  Ma. Regina E. Estuar, Ph.D.
Banana (Musa sp.), Lagundi (V. negundo) and Sambong (B. balsamifera) are three commercially important plants of the Philippines. According to the Philippine Board of Investments, banana is one of the country's most important fruit crops one of the top leading producers with estimates of value of Philippine banana production reaching about PHP100B. On the other hand, according to the Philippine Council for Health Research and Development (PCHRD), a single pharmaceutical company alone is earning millions of pesos from the sales of products from Philippine Medicinal Plants. In both agricultural products, early and accurate detection of plant diseases and quality is necessary for timely implementation of appropriate control measures to ensure adequate supplies and guard against economic losses. Portable monitoring devices are becoming the norm because of the advances in device biotechnology, as well as rapid progress in software, computing and telecommunications technology such that early detection of plant diseases or early detection of contamination in plants can be done at trace levels. However, mobile detection devices are not easily accessible to farmers and farm owners. At the same time, laboratory based detection is time consuming, complex and costly. As such, the project proposes to develop Farm Smart kit, which is essentially cloud based intelligent plant disease mobile detection system using wireless sensors and microscopy to monitor plant health. The project takes on a multidisciplinary approach by merging electronic communications engineering, computer science and biology in addressing a specific problem in agriculture being the late detection of disease and possible contamination in important agricultural crops in the country. (This is currently under review by PCIEERD DOST)
  • Smart Communications, Inc, "SHINE (Secured Health Information Network Exchange) Lab", funded by Smart Communications, Inc., Jun 2013 - Dec 2016. 
  • Project Leader:  Ma. Regina E. Estuar, Ph.D.
The Project aims to further the development and enhancement of SHINE guided by a community-driven approach, considering needs and priorities of the developer, user, and funding communities. The Project will involve the setting up of a SHINE research and development laboratory at AJWCC in ATENEO focused on mobile- and web-based healthcare information systems development and has the intent to support the planned transformation of SHINE into an open-source license and community.
  • "Advanced Traffic and Pollution Monitoring and Analysis System Based on GPS Trajectory Data, Air Quality Data and Engine Status Data from Taxis in Metro Manila", funded by DOST-PCIEERD, Nov 2013 - Oct 2014.
  • Project Leader: Proceso L. Fernandez, Jr., Ph.D.
The smart traffic monitoring is greatly facilitated by the systematic development of baseline traffic monitoring systems and building on this platform newer system technologies and computer modelling. Through this project, we propose a leap frog program that begins with baseline OD data development and quickly, in the span of a few years, transition to a modern traffic understanding system by building an Advanced Traffic Monitoring and Analysis System for Metro Manila based on GPS trajectory tracking on public utility vehicles and government vehicles. The objective of the project is to provide baseline telematics system. The overall project goals are to induce efficient traffic flow and to improve traffic mobility in Metro Manila through a provision of public information regarding current and predicted traffic flow on major routes. Furthermore, the result of the project will enhance policy formulation among government agencies and universities in the Philippines through a provision of shared data for transportation planning and operation. The smart telematics system will provide real-time traffic information. At the same time, because historical information is also available, the system can provide a more reliable traffic prediction.
  • "Efficient Flash Codes For Improving Flash Memory Lifetime", funded by Loyola Schools, Apr 2013 - Mar 2014. 
  • Project Leader: Proceso L. Fernandez, Jr., Ph.D.
Flash memory is a non-volatile computer memory that is commonly used in USB flash drives, memory cards and solidstate drives. It consists of many blocks of flash cells, with each cell capable of storing some amount of electric charge. The charges in the cells of a block are then interpreted as data values using some mapping called a flash code. In the current technology, flash cells have asymmetric writing property. That is, it is easy to increase the charge that a cell contains, but it is difficult to do the reverse. Physically, increasing the charge is done by electron injection. This process is abstractly referred to as a cell write. To decrease the charge, the entire block containing the cell has to be discharged, and this process is called a block erasure.  Unfortunately, some damage is incurred when doing a block erasure. After some number of such erasures, the flash memory becomes unreliable [6]. To extend the lifetime of a flash memory, hardware technology can be improved so that the physical limit in the number of block erasures allowable is increased. Alternatively, the flash code can be made more efficient so that more cell writes can be done before a single block erasure becomes necessary. This will decrease the frequency of block erasures and, therefore, increase the lifetime of the flash memory. The latter approach is the target of this study.
  • "Integrated Software System for Collecting and Analyzing Disaster-related SMS and Web Messages", funded by CHED-Phernet, Dec 2012 - Dec 2013. 
  • Project Leader: Proceso L. Fernandez, Jr., Ph.D.
Disaster Risk Analysis requires collection of pertinent information and processing the gathered information. This project aims to first develop a software-based information system that can efficiently collect voluntary information related to disasters and sent through the Internet and mobile device communication channels. Such types of information may include request for relief goods/services, voluntary reporting of situations, inquiry-type messages, etc. It is envisioned that this system will be used by government and non-government organizations focusing on disaster management. The system is envisioned to also provide a framework where future modules on collecting data from sensors can easily be connected to the system. A repository containing voluminous data might pose a challenge for extracting important information. To meet this challenge, data mining algorithms will be executed in order to analyze the data and derive meaningful patterns from these.
  • "Theoretical Foundation for Analyzing Graph-based Trajectories of Agents and Items", funded by Philippine Higher Education Research Network (CHED-PHERNET), Jan 2013 - Dec 2015.
  • Project Leader: Kardi Teknomo, Ph.D.
Traffic assignment deals with route selection and prediction between origin and destination pairs in a transportation network. Given the adjacency matrix of the graph representing the network, the traffic assignment methods require an Origin-Destination (OD) matrix as input. The OD matrix specifies the possible origin-destination pairs to consider, and the number of agents that are expected to take each given OD pair. The main output of such methods is a flow matrix predicting the amount of flow in each edge of the network graph. The result finds application in business planning involving pedestrian facilities and in government planning for road networks. With improvements in technology, it is now possible to collect actual flow on a network using existing tracking devices such as GPS, mobile or wireless devices. This study leverages on the features of these tracking devices and assumes that the trajectory of each agent in a network can be determined. The method proposed in this study uses the trajectories as inputs, together with the adjacency matrix of the network graph. Among the outputs are the OD matrix, link flow and an additional output of alternative route flow. Our study further categorizes trajectories into real-time and ordinal, depending on whether or not accurate time-stamps are recorded for every given position. Ordinal trajectories involve sequences (i.e., order is important) of positions only, whereas those that contain time information are real-time. The reason for such a categorization is some tracking systems are able to time-stamp the agent positions, while others are not. We further differentiate between Euclidean trajectory (which is based on the Euclidian coordinate system) and graph trajectory (which is based on node and link positions). For our study, we focus on graph-based models, and assume or explore some mappings from Euclidean space.
  • "Design, Development, and Deployment of an Augmented Reality Game for Philippine History. Commission on Higher Education. National Higher Education Research Agenda", funded by Commission on Higher Education, Sep 2014 - Sep 2015. 
  • Project Leader: Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo, Ph.D.
The objective of the project is to create an augmented reality game for Philippine history.