By Hanah Tabios

A group of Filipino data scientists is now aiming to get enough support both from public and private sectors after winning the prestigious National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Space Apps Challenge last January.

Space Apps is the world’s largest global hackathon which gathers all big data enthusiasts and experts for a 48-hour challenge to use NASA’s open data to build innovative solutions to real-life problems. The 2019 challenge was simultaneously conducted in October with over 29,000 participants from 71 countries and in 225 cities.

The Manila event was hosted by De La Salle University, where a six-member Filipino team bested 24 participating teams across the Philippines.

But among the 2,067 projects produced globally, 36 were shortlisted for the six global award categories.

From among them, ‘Project AEDES’ received the “Best in Use of Data” recognition from NASA for their breakthrough. The name derives from the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the carrier of the dengue virus. The acronym also stands for Advanced Early Dengue Prediction and Exploration Service (AEDES).

“The issue that we wanted to address is the presence of mosquitoes, and…the knowledge of someone with dengue. That’s kind of the core issue we wanted to address with our project,” project leader and data entrepreneur Dominic Ligot said in an interview.

Dengue cases tracker

Before the competition, the country’s health department declared a national dengue epidemic in August last year after the number of dengue cases reached an all-time high record of 146,062 from January to July 2019.

The figures reported were 98 percent higher than the same period in 2019 according to DOH.

“In 2019, dengue was at an all-time high. It was, I think, a five-year high. At the time, we joined the competition when we were doing the rough calculation, parang five people were dying of dengue. So when we signed up, it was around August or September, there were about a thousand deaths already. And then every day, one thousand ‘yung infections,” he said.

Now a web-based application, Project AEDES zeroes in on the importance of improving the public health response against dengue in the country by predicting dengue cases from climate and digital data and pinpointing possible hotspots from satellite data.

Their winning project relies on three types of data sets, namely: global data or the satellite imaging data from satellites Sentinel-2, Copernicus, and Landsat; local data or the climate data from the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical, and Astronomical Service Administration (Pagasa); and digital data from Google search trends for dengue and other related terms.

The app provides mosquito hotspots, dengue data, and local forecasts, which Ligot said can be likened to a flood mapping tool.

“It’s currently 82 percent correlation. It’s not perfect, but it’s enough to establish a trend. If you think about it, if I am 82 percent certain that there may be a spike in dengue in two months, what can I do with that information?

“And then we can rank all of the areas in the Philippines and say hey look, go to Tacloban, go to Iloilo, go to Cotabato, because this is where the indicators are seeing [a] spike in dengue,” he said, adding that the tool can give the viewers about 30 meters resolution up to street level of a potential dengue breeding ground.

But the team emphasized that the invention, for now, will be open for public use as it was meant for social good in terms of helping local government units (LGUs) and the national government reduce dengue cases in the future.

The tool was also meant to mobilize relevant action against a potential health scare.

Human rights aspect

Apart from Ligot, who was a founder of a local big data company, the team is also composed of statistical models expert Claire Tayco, geospatial models expert Jansen Lopez, and data engineer Mark Toledo. They were later joined by data builder and designer Cricket Soong and human rights expert Nick Tobia.

In the press conference, a question was raised about the human rights aspect of the project to which Tobia replied: “All social problems have a data component.”

As the fourth industrial revolution highlights the fusion of both digital and physical worlds, the group believes that depriving the public of access to data, in all its forms, is also a violation of basic human rights.

The project offers data transparency in terms of a tracker tool.

While the app is still free for use, the group remains open to potential patent proposals.

Meanwhile, Project AEDES will be incubated at DLSU’s Animo Labs where the organization will provide the team with a safe and secure environment to develop their innovation and other forms of assistance including data privacy, intellectual property privacy, and assistance in product registration.