This was posted in Inquirer.net regions section a week ago:
At least 13 digital rain gauges have been installed in seven towns and two cities of the province, and 12 more are coming, courtesy of the Social Action Center of the Archdiocese of Legazpi.
Cedric Daep, executive officer of the Provincial Disaster Coordinating Council, said early warning devices would also be given to communities so that information could be relayed quickly to the residents.
Disaster officials have been trained to interpret data from the wired rain gauges, which cost almost P7,000 each and are placed in municipal halls. The gauges can detect possible landslides, lahar and flooding through a criteria carefully devised by the PDCC.
When the device records rainfall of 1 millimeter per minute, mudflows from Mayon Volcano are likely to occur, Daep said. A 7.2 mm-per-hour rainfall could mean heavy flooding, especially in low-lying areas
Indeed it is more cost effective to deploy an array of sensors across an specific area rather than buying multi-million dollar equipment like weather radars. But in order to obtain useful information in a timely manner, the network for these gauges should be properly designed. There have been a lot of research on deploying highly resilient networks for rain conditions. I am currently involved in the Rain research group of the ECCE department. Aside from studying how rain affects the signals and performance of the rain sensor, our group proposed to use the network itself as the sensor. We are also researching on innovating data gathering methodologies such as using digital recorders (acoustic sensors) as rain observation equipment.
Related articles:
Rain research group-look at some of our group’s latest results and findings in our projects such as the 26 GHz WIPAS, 5 GHz Motorola canopy, Celltrak GSM signal monitor and accoustic sensors.
Disaster management-conference presentation at the 5th ICT-Seminar in Taipei
The ICT-Asia is a program of the French government to foster cooperation and networking in research and training in ICT in Asia. Last November 18-22, they hosted their 5th conference in Taipei in cooperation with the National Science Council of Taiwan. The delegates were from France and other countries in Asia such as India, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan. It was a very good opportunity to network with fellow scientists from other countries in future research projects and collaborations.
I presented our department’s works in applying wireless networks for emergency response system in the seminar. This slide presentation is under the theme network infrastructure. The title of my talk is “Rapidly deployable disaster management systems”. Below are the slides that were used for the presentation.
I think the topic of my presentation was well received. It stimulated a lot of discussions and created a potential to forge partnerships and collaborations in future ICT Asia funding programs and other research proposals. If you are also interested in the presentation I presented above, feel free to contact me or any faculty member of the ECCE department.
Other talks from the Ateneo de Manila’s delegation was, “Medical image analysis and information retrieval with grid computing applications” presentated by Dr. Rafael Saldana of the Mathematics department, “Patient driven mobile phone-enabled medical health services” by Dr. Nathaniel Libatique of the ECCE department.
Thank you to Dr. Libatique for helping me build this presentation!
Since the Asia Regionals site was moved back to Singapore from Manila. Dr. Raffy Saldana, the regional contest director wants to keep the momentum of competitive programming in the Philippines. So Computing Society of the Philippines (CSP) decided to organized an ICPC-style nationwide programming contest. The event was hosted by De La Salle University-Canlubang.
A parallel event to the programming contest is a series of talks sharing best programming practices regarding ACM-stylecompetitive programming. Ateneo de Manila University’s head coach, Dr. Pablo Manalastas shared mentoring stratagies. I was invited to speak about “Best Practices in Computer Programming” together with Topher Rigor. We were both members of The Linden BoyZ who particpated in the 2006 San Antonio World Finals. Below is the slide presentation of my part of the talk:
In the first slides of my presentation, I told the audience that ICPC-style programming contests does not promote good programming practice. I reminisced how we used obscure variable names like z, zz, zzz, ___, ___, _____ . And then the rest of the talk was about how to build skills individually and as a team. The talk we delivered was very short and I tried as much as I can to stretch the program by referring to key programming contests events and how we tackled challenges. I felt very much like a retired soldier telling war stories to his grandchildren.
Classes have been suspended for three consecutive days due to heavy rain. At last I can slack off preparing for class and concentrate on the other side of academic work: research.
The ECCE Department is very interested in studying its properties in the context of Philippine tropical rain. We have various publications exhibiting the crazy stuff we do these days. One of our projects it to characterize rain in terms of its effects on wireless telecommunications systems. A few weeks ago, we went out to the field to make key field measurements of its received signal levels over some distances. It makes sense that the distance between two directional transceivers increases, it is harder to align them.
Here are some pictures during the propagation studies. The operation was performed ona clear sunny day.
I just arrived in our department from a VoIP appreciation seminar in the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI). Sir Paul, our secretary said that Dr. Toby Dayrit (the Dean) is looking for some faculty in the ECCE department to explain the relationship of the probability of being struck by lightning by wearing an iPod. Apparently all our PhD faculty were not yet available so they sent me (Yay!).
An article was posted in the Manila Standard and in other online news sites. Sol Aragones of ABS-CBN News interviewed me to shed some light. My blockmate, Gim uploded snippet of the TV Patrol report on YouTube.
Sol said I speak in Filipino because TV Patrol is a show for the masses. I was very tempted to say nadagitab (to be electrocuted). Just as the news article said, electronic/ conductive devices in your body excarbate the damage done by being struck by lightning. I also gave a precautionary message about being in lightning prone areas. Avoid them during stormy weather specially today in the Philippine’s rainy season. To get out in case of such a situation (e.g an open field), drop and lie down to decrease your probability of being struck by lightning.
Edit: The report seemed to stress that there is an increased probability in getting hit by lighting when one has an electronic device (e.g. an iPod). There is no correlation between the two. If you are in a open field, most likely you will be struck by lightning whether you are wearing an iPod or not.
Thank you to Dr. Dayrit who referred the Electronics, Computer and Communications Engineering Department’s knowledge and Sir Paul for sending me to the Dean’s office.
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