Marlene M. De Leon

Nationalism in Local Media During International Conflict Text Mining Domestic News Reports of the China–Philippines Maritime Dispute

Using the lens of positioning theory and a mixed methods strategy, we investigate domestic media’s production of nationalism during an international conflict. Philippine and Chinese news accounts of the Scarborough Shoal conflict are text mined by RapidMiner software. With almost 100% accuracy, mathematical models successfully classify sets-of-words that belong to each domestic newspaper. Principal components analyses show that Philippine Daily Inquirer reports revolve around words related to local fishing and livelihoods. News accounts in China’s People’s Daily uphold national sovereignty. A complementary qualitative analysis of the news reports gives our mathematically derived themes more meaning. Philippine maritime claims cite recent Philippine history and international law. China’s story references lost sovereignty and ancient rather than recent history. Positioning analysis demonstrates how each newspaper claims its own country owns Scarborough Shoal and is the victim of the other country. Our findings show how two contradictory and nationalistic versions of an international conflict may be linguistically constructed by domestic media. Our research also highlights the illuminative power of positioning theory in the field of international relations and media analysis.

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.

Validating UI through UX in the Context of a Mobile - Web Crowdsourcing Disaster Management Application

A significant role of good user interface design is to enhance user experience. Keywords and icons are heavily used in mobile applications because of the limited screen size and small keypad interface. In creating a mobile based crowdsourcing application to motivate citizens to report disaster events and experiences, use of keywords and icons should be intuitive, have high recall and make reporting accurate. This paper discusses the user validation results of user interface design through user experience measured by intuitiveness, recall, and accuracy. For keywords, results showed that keywords were appropriate however there is a need to include selection of multiple keywords as well as language translated into native tongue. For icons, intuitiveness score were relatively high for most icons. Icons that had low recognition were because of multiple interpretations. Recall scores increased significantly after training. Enhancing user experience using simulation scenarios increased responsiveness but decreased correct submissions. This study shows that engagement increases if simulations depict real scenarios making the system relevant to its intended users.

Agent-Based Modeling Approach in Understanding Behavior During Disasters: Measuring Response and Rescue in eBayanihan Disaster Management Platform

Development of a disaster management system is as complex as the environment it mimics. In 2015, the eBayanihan disaster management platform was launched in Metro Manila, Philippines. It is designed to be an integrated multidimensional and multi-platform system that can be used in managing the flow of information during disaster events. Since its development, usage of the system varies depending on the agent who uses the system and which area is affected by what type of disaster. As a complex problem, behavior of disaster agents, such as official responders, volunteers, regular citizens, is best understood if the system can capture, model, and visualize behavior over time. This study presents the development and implementation of an agent-based approach in understanding disaster response and rescue by automatically capturing agent behavior in the eBayanihan Disaster Management Platform. All user activities are logged and converted into behavior matrices that can be saved and imported into the Organizational Risk Analyzer (ORA) tool. ORA is used to generate the agent-based model which can be viewed in the eBayanihan platform. Actual behavior (ABehM) is compared against perceived (PBM) and expected behavior (EBM) during rescue and response. Results show that EBM networks are fully connected while PBM during rescue and response are granular and vast. Both however show centrality at the provincial and municipal level. ABehM on the other hand shows concentration only at the municipal level with more interactions with ordinary volunteers and citizens.

Development of an asynchronous communication channel between wireless sensor nodes, smartphone devices, and web applications using RESTful Web Services for intelligent farming

Environment and agriculture related applications have been gaining ground for the past several years and have been the context for researches in ubiquitous and pervasive computing. This study is a part of a bigger study that uses artificial intelligence in developing models to detect, monitor, and forecast the spread of Fusarium oxysporum cubense TR4 (FOC TR4) on Cavendish bananas cultivated in the Philippines. To implement an Intelligent Farming system, 1) wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) are deployed in Philippine banana plantations to collect soil parameter data that is considered to affect the health of Cavendish bananas, 2) a custom built smartphone application is used for collecting, storing, and transmitting soil data, plant images and plant status data to a cloud storage, and 3) a custom built web application is used to load and display results of physico-chemical analysis of soil, analysis of data models, and geographic locations of plants being monitored. This study discusses the issues, considerations, and solutions implemented in the development of an asynchronous communication channel to ensure that all data collected by WSNs and smartphone applications are transmitted with a high degree of accuracy and reliability. From a design standpoint: standard API documentation on usage of data type is required to avoid inconsistencies in parameter passing. From a technical standpoint, there is a need to include error-handling mechanisms especially for delays in transmission of data as well as generalize method of parsing thru multidimensional array of data. Strategies are presented in the paper.