Roberto Raffo CSC journey

The first week of our #IBMCSC assignment for IRRI is finished.

I arrived on June 24th in Manila and I met my mates for dinner. I immeditaly had the feeling of a great and smart group with the aptitude, talent and preparation to help IRRI mission. The group is composed by members from all over the world: US, Mexico, Brazil, Netherland, Spain, Slovakia, South Africa, India and, of course Italy!

We spent the first day (June 25th) with a briefing and an icebraking session in Manila together with our NGO partner, Pyxera Global.

The second day (June 26th) was a free day when our partner organized a tour inside the “Intramuros” of Manila, where we have a feeling both of the beauty of the city and of the ariny season!

On the third day (June 27th) we left Manila to Los Banos out final destination and where our partner IRRI and SEARCA are based. But before leaving Manila we spent the morning with the HQ of IBM Philippine, where we met the IBM Philippines General Manager Luis Pineda.

Luis explained us that Philippines is a high growing country with a great potential and IBM Philippines is running very well there: from the GM to the bottom we found and enthusiatic population of IBMrs.

We then left Manila to Los Banos where we immediately had a kick-off with the customers. Around the table there were the representative of each project from a customer perspective together with the IRRI’s management starting from the head, director general, Matthew Morell, and other important stakeholders like V. Bruce J. Tolentino that leads several key areas of IRRI programming.

June 28th was the day of the formal kick-off with all the stakeholders, IBM GM, IRRI DG including the US Peace Corps representative for the Philippines, were there: Jean Seigle, Country Director, Peace Corps Philippines.

Each project had its formal session, including the big data project where my colleague Richard D. Chang had the speech on our behalf: good job @rdcphilippines!

We spent the rest of the week (June 29th, 30th) interviewing a lot of IRRi’s departments in order to assess their current environments and their needs in terms of Big Data.

Finally, Friday July the 1st we went to Manila for a meeting with the IRRI’s partner DOST-ASTI in order to have a better understanding of their capabilities and to figure out how they can be used by IRRI to accomplish its mission.

The first week is gone, the impression are super positive: it is so rewarding to work with this team of IBM talents and supporting IRRI towards its mission.

First of all a little background on #IBMCSC and IRRI.

IBM Corporate Service Corps (CSC) is part of the IBM Corporate Social Responsibility program. CSC is a a high quality leadership development experience for IBM employees while delivering cutting edge problem solving for communities and organizations in emerging markets.

The program increases IBM employees’understanding and appreciation of growth markets while creating global leaders who are culturally aware and possess advanced teaching skills. The CSC offers a triple benefit: leadership development for the IBMers, training and development for local organizations, and greater knowledge and enhanced reputation in the growth markets for IBM.

International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) aims to reduce poverty and hunger, improve the health of rice farmers and consumers, and ensure environmental sustainability of rice farming. IRRI does these through mostly research and partnerships.

In this case we are a group of 15 IBMrs divided in group of 3, involved in 5 different projects.

The project where I am involved is the Big Data project. 

Basically IRRI is producing a lot of data that come from all their activities: for example sequencing, genotyping and phenotyping the rice plants. Other data come from also drones and other stationary platform that IRRI uses to monitor the plantations.

Today wakeup at 5.45am, quick breakfast, direction Manila to meet DOST-ASTI (Advanced Science and Technology Institute). Our list of questions is quite long for this very interesting meeting where we are willing to figure out how IRRI can best leverage ASTI infrastructure, using High Performance Computing capabilities in order to pursue its objectives to reduce poverty and hunger. ASTI personnel is always very kind, warm and willing to provide all the help both in terms of skills and technology for the benefit of the IRRI mission.

They dedicated to us a full half day explaining their powerful HPC infrastructure trying to figure out together how to collaborate in the most effective way.

We had the chance to visit also the datacenter and the other departments that take care of the network around Philippines, the devices for the weather forecast and other satellite projects.