Ma. Regina E. Estuar

ABKD: Multimodal Mobile Language Game for Collaborative Learning of Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji Characters

This paper discusses the use of ABKD, a multimodal mobile learning game that aims to help Filipino students remember and increase their Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji vocabularies by engaging them in a collaborative game-like group activity and challenging their creativity and imagination through drawing, taking pictures, and audio recording. Feedback from language learners reveal that ABKD has the potential to make learning and remembering Hanzi and Kanji characters easier, more fun, and more interesting.

eHealth TABLET: A Developing Country Perspective in Managing the Development and Deployment of a Mobile - Cloud Electronic Medical Record for Local Government Units

In January 2013, the eHealth TABLET (Technology Assisted Boards for Local government unit Efficiency and Transparency) project began with a two-fold objective of: 1) creating a tablet based system that will integrate existing health information systems to address the national objective of a unified health information management system by 2015 and 2) to create a transparency layer at the local government units such that communication lines between municipal health officers and the mayor are monitored. Bottom up approach was used to ensure that all features requested by multi-stakeholders are included in the design of the system. The end product was a mobile - web based system with the mobile application having three main components: the electronic medical record (EMR) application which comprises of the patient record and diagnosis module, the requests/approval application, and the dashboard application for data visualization. Responding to the needs of intended users, the web based application provides the following features: web auxiallry entry, aggregated disease report application and usage monitoring. Regular usage monitoring increased usage over time. For ICT development projects in public health, iteratve involvement of multi-stakeholders is necessary to ensure higher acceptance and adoption. From a design perspective, technologies should be designed to be interoperable such that interfacing with existing systems will be seamless.

Bottom Up Approach and Devolved Design of a Health Information System: eHealth TABLET

Health care is expensive in the Philippines because of the lack of medical experts and facilities that are able to reach remote areas in the country. At the same time, access to real time health information is also undermined by several layers of paper based data entry. In areas where there are existing information systems, the burden is placed on the health worker in using several information systems to address various health concerns. This paper presents eHealth TABLET (Technology Assisted Boards for Local government unit Efficiency and Transparency), a local mobile (tablet-based) electronic medical record system and dashboard for decision making (coupled with a Doctor-Mayor communication feature) designed to answer problems in accessibility, efficiency and transparency following a bottom up approach and devolved approach in designing the system. As a local Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system, it provides the municipalities with a tailor-fit simple patient record system to better address the needs of their patients. As a health dashboard, it provides accurate and real-time visualizations of local patient data for decision-making purposes. As a messaging system, it provides a more efficient and transparent communication system between the Mayor (Local Chief Executive) and the Doctor (Health Officer).

Rapid Application Development of Ebayanihan Patroller: A Crowdsourcing SMS Service and Web Visualization Disaster Reporting System

As a country frequented by natural disasters, it is important for Philippines and its citizens to unite and work together in mitigating the effects of natural disasters. eBayanihan came from the term bayanihan which refers to the widespread Philippine tradition and spirit of communal unity and effort to achieve a common objective. Having information at the most opportune moment is key to saving lives and property during occurrences of natural disasters as well as providing immediate relief to the victims. When regular citizens take part in providing information to authorities that may respond to critical situations, more tragedies may be averted and more needs may be alleviated. Leveraging on the high penetration rate of SMS services in the country, eBayanihan Patroller provides a crowdsourcing SMS service that will allow every Filipino to provide the information needed for informed decision-making.

Towards Location Approximation of Typhoon Related Discourse: On Region Definition and Temporal Segmentation

Tweets have augmented disaster information in variety of ways. Different tools employ tweets as a data source to aid in disaster event detection, knowledge extraction and situational awareness. A constant problem faced by these efforts, however, is the lack of geospatial information in majority of tweets leaving only less than 1% of tweets useful for data mining. Though studies have devised methods to approximate the location of non-geotagged tweets, applying these same methods on disaster tweets may not be the optimal choice given that disaster tweets contain domain specific characteristics. A model for approximating the location of disaster tweets must take into account how human discourse changes as the typhoon progresses, and therefore, how tweet content is affected by the location of the eye of the typhoon and the disaster affected areas. This study seeks to find the geospatial characteristics of disaster tweets in relation to typhoon relevant locations and to present initial models for predicting disaster related tweet locations through region definition relative to disaster relevant locations such as the disaster affected area and the eye of the typhoon. The first explores characteristics and relationships between the path of the typhoon, the location of the affected area and the location of the tweets pertaining to the typhoon. The second part presents two new disaster relative region definition schemes, namely: regions defined based on relative distance to the disaster affected area and regions defined based on relative distance to the eye of the typhoon. Tweets can then be geotagged to these defined regions. Based on the results, the location of the disaster related tweets are significantly related to both the location of the typhoon and an identified affected area. Furthermore, models that predict location relative to the disaster area outperform models that predict location relative to the eye of the typhoon both in accuracy and error distance. The results also show that for geospatial modeling, there is a need to consider creating models for each specific and smaller timespan instead of a single model for the whole coorpus to increase accuracy and lower error distance.

Using Social Network Analysis in Understanding The Public Discourse on Gender Violence: an Agent-Based Modelling Approach

There are many representations attributed to gender-based violence. Public discourse provides useful datasets that can be studied in order to study such representations. Social network modelling is a way to study that public discourse, by looking at how opinions in a discourse interact and repeat themselves on a large scale and over time. This study aims to construct a social network model using an agent-based approach to measure whether the conversation space of certain gender violence discourses are more centered on victims, perpetrators, institutions, or society. It will use network measures of centrality, immediate impact analysis, and centrality changes over time to compare the context of two cultures: Philippines and the United States. The data set from the Philippines consists of articles on the Vizconde Massacre and the data set from the United States consists of articles on the Stanford Rape Case. Results show that both datasets feature an institution-centric discourse that is consistent over time, and that society has the lowest role-centrality in both events. Perpetrators appear more central than victims, but comparatively more so in the Stanford Rape dataset compared to the Vizconde Massacre one.

The challenge of continuous user participation in eBayanihan: Digitizing humanitarian action in a nationwide web mobile participatory disaster management system

Disaster is a complex problem that needs to be addressed using a multidimensional and multiplatform framework in collecting information from disaster agents. Social media has been an additional source of information from the ground. eBayanihan is designed to add the human dimension by providing a mobile and web based reporting tool for citizen reporting aside from collecting information in social media. The system serves as a real time dashboard for government agencies assigned to monitor communities during disaster events. However, success of community based computing systems such as eBayanihan is measured by continuous participation from its users. Appropriate motivation is relevant assuring continuous participation. This paper presents a new method of designing a community based computing environment that uses motivation analysis in determining the most probable critical software features that will maximize continuous user participation. The features to be evaluated were extracted from the development team and an initial survey was conducted to determine user motivations based on the volunteer functions inventory. Initial factor analysis revealed three motivation types, namely: civic responsibility, career, and protection. A second survey evaluated the usefulness of each feature in usage scenarios based on the motivation types identified in the first survey. Results indicate that Posting Messages in an Open Forum, Reputation Rating by Peers and Event Notification via FB, Twitter or Text are affected by two factors, namely user motivation and scenario, further validated in usage statistics in eBayanihan.

Perspectives on Apology and Reconciliaticon in South and Southeast Asia

This chapter focuses on perspectives on apology and reconciliation with the South and Southeast Asian region and in Asia Pacific more generally; it discusses factors associated with conflict resolution in the context of emerging societies with vested interests in economic growth and overcoming postwar challenges. A convenience sample of participants from India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka completed the Personal and Institutional Rights to Aggression and Peace Survey (PAIRTAPS) and provided qualitative responses concerning apology and reconciliation. Based on a grounded theory approach, themes were identified and analyzed. Nearly half the responses indicated that the potential of an apology to lead to reconciliation depends on factors such as the nature of the apology and further action by the former aggressor. In addition, the lead author discusses her personal experiences and interactions with the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in its efforts to bring perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge genocide to justice as they relate to the pursuit of global peace, conflict resolution, social justice, and economic-political sustainability in South and Southeast Asia.

Perspectives on Achieving Peace in South and Southeast Asia

This chapter focuses on perceptions of the achievability of peace and the best ways to achieve peace expressed by 501 participants from seven countries in South and Southeast Asia. This chapter begins with a discussion of regional characteristics that may affect perceptions of peace, such as a history of colonization and the presence of relatively homogenous racial and religious subgroups within each country. Participants’ responses to two prompts were coded for agency, disengagement/humanitarian engagement, and prerequisites for peace. Generally, responses expressed by the participants were both agentic and engaged, meaning they expressed hope that peace can be achieved and described actions that can be taken to achieve peace. Many participants gave responses that emphasized interpersonal concepts and values (such as love, compassion, and understanding) as necessary for achieving peace. Interaction between groups was another commonly mentioned pathway toward achieving peace. These common themes reflect the needs of the region to build understanding and respect across subgroups with conflict-ridden pasts.

Definitions of Peace and Reconciliation in South and Southeast Asia

There are many factors that distinguish Southeast Asia from other parts of the world in regard to peace and reconciliation. The unique interplay and influence of factors, particularly cultural, socioeconomic, political, and historical factors, impact the people of this region. These factors not only influence each other, they ultimately impact how people view the risks of violence, the efficacy of nonviolence, and their response to adversity and conflict. Participants from seven different South and Southeast Asian countries responded to the Personal and Institutional Rights to Aggression and Peace Survey. Analysis of their definitions of peace and reconciliation revealed that a majority of the respondents focused on positive peace (prerequisites for and outcomes of peace) and a large majority (over 60 %) viewed reconciliation as a process rather than as an end state. Exploratory chi-square analyses revealed that a significantly larger proportion of females than males identified reconciliation as a process. Additionally, more females than males associated reconciliation with peace.