August 22, 2018

The staff from the Philippine Rice Information System  Unit (PRISM) of PhilRice and the Department of Science and Technology – Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI) conducted a one-day inception meeting last August 7, 2018 to initiate Research and Development collaboration. During the meeting, the two groups were oriented on various services and activities being done by each other and initially identified points of collaborations.

PRISM identified ASTI as a beneficial partner because it has the facilities for system redundancy, data storage, data access and sharing, and high performance computer for satellite data downloading and processing capabilities. ASTI’s Philippine Earth Data Resource and Observation (PEDRO) Center, Remote Sensing and Data Science (DATOS), and Computing and Archiving Research Environment (CoARE) Projects will provide these services to PRISM. Another good thing about the two’s partnership, ASTI can request for an increase of funds because PRISM has been added as their stakeholders and users of their services. The increase of their funds will improve their facilities.

The PEDRO Center will focus on the setting up of a system and infrastructure that will securely receive, process, exploit and distribute space-borne imagery and derive information from the supported remote sensing satellites for various applications like disaster effect mitigation. The DATOS Project will help PRISM on the production of maps using existing DOST technologies and data (among other sources) to be used as reference during disasters. On the other hand, the CoARE Project will focus on the provision of the platform for easy storage, analysis and sharing of environmental and geospatial data, as well as provide better access to high performance computing resources.

After the meeting, the staff from ASTI invited the PRISM staff to visit their Ground Receiving Station to show their state-of-the-art facilities and equipment.
A memorandum of agreement between the partnership of PRISM and ASTI was drafted and is being reviewed for finalization. As part of their agreement, PRISM will acknowledge ASTI in any of its papers, publications, and/or presentations upon using their products and services.