Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Remote Sensing and Data Science: DATOS Help Desk facilitated the signing of the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) on Research Collaboration between DOST-Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI) and the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).
The MOA signifies the start of a formal agreement between DOST-ASTI to pursue and sustain collaborative research on the use of earth observation data for PSA’s 2022 Census on Agriculture and Fisheries (CAF). The collaboration is then coined the “Artificial Intelligence for Census of Agriculture and Fisheries (AI4CAF) Project” which will serve as a collective denomination and citation to any form of marketing and publication between the agencies.
The DATOS Project team, along with PEDRO Center, PREGINET, and COARE, have continually coordinated with PSA for their earth observation technology needs since holding the week-long AI4EO workshop last 02 to 06 March 2020.
As part of the agency’s move to adapt to the new normal, the DATOS Project has also started an online training series for PSA through a video conference. Last 21 July 2020, the SIYASAT portal was introduced together with the PEDRO team. The SIYASAT Portal (which stands for Surveillance, Identification and Assessment using Satellites) provides DOST-ASTI's partner agencies access to earth observation data from the NovaSAR satellite. It aims to provide a secure distribution portal of images and Automatic Identification System (AIS) data captured by the satellite, among other objectives.
It was followed by a review of basic Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) concepts and applications on 05 August 2020. The participants learned more about understanding and describing the interactions of SAR signal and ground targets—all with the concepts of remote sensing in place.
The next series of training is scheduled on 20 August 2020 where the DATOS team will delve deeper into the process of generating training data and creating an Artificial Intelligence model for different features to aid in PSA’s Census 2021 operations.