Down the Rabbit Hole

Google Scholar has always had this quote on its website. It resonates with me because my scientific work builds upon the products developed by scientists before me. This is why I still marvel at the impact of Miracle Rice (IR8)  in preventing widespread hunger in Asia, and wonder if the work I previously did in improving rice quality made a dent in rice breeding pipelines . My contributions in developing the gastronomic systems research framework, such as the Robinsons Mall auctions  (Quezon City, Philippines) and the expert elicitation workshops (Kolkata and Bhubaneswar, India), helped shape the consumer research angle currently being pursued by IRRI, particularly for gauging the market acceptability of rice varieties that can potentially curb the risk of developing diabetes . My work in applying machine learning tools  to classify rice into quality types  is five years ahead of its time; I now see more people using   big data approaches  to answer incre...

Last week, the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Health (ANH) Academy  hosted a webinar on the implications of changing values and food choice to demand creation in low- to middle-income countries. It is an interesting topic because policies to improve the nutrition status of populations most vulnerable to malnutrition will see limited success if these policies are based on the assumption that consumers will just follow their recommendations blindly. Policy-makers must understand that consumers' food choices are affected by various factors, which include consumers' values. I watched the webinar recording—albeit a few days after the event—because I was involved in the early stages of IRRI's  Drivers of Food Choice project . Three country-specific projects were presented, covering Malawi, India (I was involved in this one), and Kenya. "Value" is all about a person's sense of goodness and rightness. In the food choice context, these values are the hows and whys of cons...

I first encountered natural language processing (NLP) in data science class , with a classmate's project opening my eyes to the possibilities of using the method. Before that class, I had worked on determining descriptors for rice varieties by finding the most frequently associated adjectives and finding which rice descriptors were co-occurring with viand names. I even published a paper on rice descriptors. Anyway, during class, I decided to embark on a massive (in my opinion when I was starting it) side project to sharpen my skills in NLP. I didn't realise how deep the NLP hole was until I started working on it. Sourcing the documents I remembered that IRRI lists its staff's publications online. It was just a matter of accessing the information and putting them in an Excel spreadsheet by copying and pasting... Wrong! There are over 6000 articles in the list of publications. There was no way I was going to be able to manually copy the information from the websi...

Summer was in full swing when I took my usual afternoon walk with Krishna and Ate Mary, not knowing that this was my last afternoon roaming IRRI's world-famous experimental station (I moved to California a few weeks later). I intended to take photos because the sky was largely clear. Maria Makiling was fully visible for a change. Walking at sunset to photograph birds with a point-and-shoot was not ideal, I know, but I also wanted to exercise for a bit. I was happy that we took the time to get out of our desks to walk because the sunset behind FF Hill and Chandler Halls was glorious. It's something I'd miss when I moved to the other side of the Pacific because the course I was taking did not allow for a lot of free time (I'm currently studying data analytics at UC Berkeley). Some of the roadside fields were being prepared for planting during this last walk of mine. There were no bird tapes, scarecrows, or "bird boys" at this point in the planting ...

One of the projects I spent a lot of time on in my final year at the International Rice Research Institute (as a scientist) was contributing to seven chapters in a book of grain quality methods. After many months in the making, the book has finally been released.  Writing the different chapters was like reflecting on the past years that I've been in the laboratory (I started off as a researcher; then I became a scholar, a post-doctoral fellow, and then a scientist). The chapters I contributed to described protocols in characterising rice grain quality using the usual protocols and non-routine methodologies. In some of the chapters, I wrote content that provided context to possible applications and data interpretation coming from the results of assays I haven't performed yet (e.g., inductively coupled plasma - optical emission spectrometry and near infrared spectroscopy). People come and go; the lab is in constant flux. The group I started out with has largely moved ...

Right off the bat: Economics is Matty and Val's area of expertise. I am a grain quality specialist who dabbles in linking rice quality with economics. So when I was tasked to attend the Food and Fertiliser Technology Centre and Kasetsart University's International Conference, I felt like I was fish out of water... this wasn't my field of expertise but I was going to speak about experimental auctions (a method in Economics that reveals willingness-to-pay of target consumers for goods).  In the weeks leading up to this conference, I wrote an abstract, crunched the raw data for preliminary results, wrote a full paper, and created a slide deck about the experimental auctions I did with Matty and Anna at Robinsons Pioneer. We wanted to figure out the willingness-to-pay for cultural preservation through the consumption of heirloom rice  within the gastronomic system  of the target consumers for heirloom rice. Matty also took time in teaching me the differences between Vi...

After seeing the plant collection at the Bangkok Herbarium , Reianne and I opted to continue walking to the Rice Department's exhibit; it was Thailand's National Rice Day, after all. But then we saw a familiar sign: we passed by the IRRI Thailand Office! What do you know, on my last official trip at IRRI, I pass by a country office... and this is just the second country office I've been to. The first one was the New Delhi office , which I was able to visit last year. I finally had a chance to meet the staff who run this country office and put faces to names I only see on emails about country holidays! 

Val's friends, Natasha and Dwaine, flew to the Philippines for a vacation with Veronica and Melissa, their relatives. Val made a highly organised schedule for them, which I thought was very hectic. But the visitors assured us that they have enough energy to battle through jetlag and the energy-zapping humidity of the Philippines... after Day 1, however, Val and I started crossing off activities on the schedule because these proved to be too hectic for them.  The one thing that we kept intact in the agenda was the visit to IRRI. Since Val had a meeting scheduled, I brought the visitors to the gene bank after Tita Maripi and Kuya Dehner brought them to the RiceWorld Museum. This was the first time that I had a guided tour of the gene bank facility, in all the 13+ years that I have been at IRRI. We learned about why a gene bank is important, what diversity can be found in rice grains, and how these rice varieties are prepared for long-term storage in the gene bank. We went to bot...

March hails the arrival of longer days and glorious afternoon skies. This was also a signal for me to get my butt of my chair and start walking in the afternoons (since arriving from the US, I had to catch up on a lot of things so I didn't really have the time to enjoy the outdoors... I decided to make  time for it).  I didn't make a mistake because each time I went outside, I saw pomelo-pink twilights, purple-grey clouds, and yellow-orange skies.  And because the landscape is always breath-taking at this golden hour and because I'd like to slow down and grasp the view while I had it, I decided to do walks rather than runs. I'll need to return to weight training and cardiovascular exercises in the gym... but with these sunset views, I prefer to do hour-long walks in the meantime. I do achieve my step goals but I accept that weight loss will be a lot slower. The trade-offs, however, are these photos... all taken in different days using my mobile phone. One day, ...

Dr Bienvenido Juliano used to lead the lab where I work in when it was still called the Cereal Chemistry Lab. I didn't have the honour to be mentored by Dr Juliano, who was a National Scientist and was in the first elite group of scientists who set the direction for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Though he was no longer in IRRI (he had left before I started in the Grain Quality and Nutrition Centre ), he continued to be an influential scientist in the field of cereal chemistry . He used to ask formidable questions in seminars tackling rice chemistry issues; his challenges normally drawn from 32 years of research in IRRI. Listening to him talk made me realise how little I know in the field... humbling occasions, definitely. He was the  rice grain quality expert in the Philippines. Anybody else claiming that title has yet to match his level of knowledge and experience... or is bordering on quixotic. And now, Dr Juliano is gone. He passed away this week...

Each year, IRRI schedules a week in which scientists can listen in for a week of presentations regarding the achievements of different groups from the past year and to discuss future activities in front their peers. This year, however, what we used to call GRISP Science Forum  and Common Week, had topics that focused more inwardly and was aptly called IRRI Science Week. For the past year, IRRI has undergone major changes. Management promised that the change process would be "muddy", asking all staff to be involved in the process wholeheartedly. This year, it was like a check-in with staff to see how the change process has been faring... hopefully, the mud has settled quite a bit and people could get some clarity. First off, there were movements of laboratories from one building to another. I was expecting that my group would be relocated from Hemmi Building, but so far, we haven't budged. Then, there were staff reassignments: some staff were going to be out-poste...

I have been at the Grain Quality Lab for 13 years (September 1, 2004–August 31, 2017) if my math serves me well.  This was the first group picture that the original team had. Vito and Melissa have gone back to Australia. Tina has returned to teaching at UPLB. Tita Dory and Tita Ruby have both retired. Kuya Johnny also isn't connected with IRRI anymore. Kuya Teody has been assigned to work in the Grain Quality and Nutrition Services Lab (GQNSL) in the third floor. Tita Leslie is in PhilRice, I think. Tita Puring passed away years ago. So the only people left in the Grain Quality Lab in Hemmi Building's first floor annex from that original group are me, Ana , and Kuya Jun . Of course, with the passing of time came the arrivals and the departures of staff and scholars, making the lab a dynamic place to be in. I was supposed to leave in May 2014  when my postdoctoral fellowship ended. However, I was able to somehow do two things at the same time:  teaching at...

Chef Claude Tayag  wanted to talk about rice in one of the episodes of his show Chasing Flavors , aired on Lifestyle TV. It's a show that gives a platform for people to talk about local ingredients and the diversity of Philippine cuisine. Unfortunately, Claude himself couldn't be at IRRI in person because he was at ANC for an interview. Instead, his production crew dropped by to do the interview. With me was Leoniza, who handles media relations at IRRI. The on-cam interview was conducted at the Plant Growth Facility, IRRI's newest building. In the lab where I was interviewed, rice samples were being sorted in the background. 

A trip abroad, whether a work trip or a personal vacation, is something that I always document. For this India adventure for our project, I also took a few hundred photos. Here, I share some of the outtakes from my photo roll... those photos that won't end up in trip reports. Many of them are group shots in the airports and in the planes, and candids during the expert elicitation workshops .  Yeah, some people believe YOLO and tend to post photos in social media as they happen; I, however, tend to post them after the trip in my blog... as I process what I happened during our whirlwind of a field trip into something that I could help me in writing technical papers and trip reports. Hello, Bhubaneswar! We got out of the airport and onto the taxi queue as the downpour tapered off. Breakfast at the Mayfair Lagoon just before the Hanuman langur made an entrance. Last-minute preparations before the expert elicitation workshops in Bhubaneswar. The whole team flyi...

Why were we in India in the first place?  Matty, Jhoanne, and I flew in from the Philippines to join Arindam and Suva in the first of our activities under the Drivers of Food Choice project in East India. The article below is a piece I wrote on paper (it's been a while since I wrote a first draft by hand) while we were in a plane from Kolkata to New Delhi. By the time we landed in New Delhi, the piece had gone around the whole team for their revisions and was ready for submission to the editors back in IRRI headquarters.  Below is the piece as it got published in IRRI's news section  a few days ago.  --- Enhancing nutrition through gastronomic research Expert elicitation workshop in Kolkata New Delhi, INDIA—“To find effective interventions that can improve nutritional security for poor families in eastern India, researchers must first better understand what drives their food choices,” says Dr Matty Demont, senior economist at the International...

For the past few months, the buzz word at the work place is culture change . An abstract concept that is difficult to grasp if where we're at is not dissected, analysed, and critiqued; and where we want to go is not defined. After all, the concept of the need for any   change  in itself implies that something is inherently imperfect in the system and that there is room for improvement.  The group I found myself being in want to improve the way the institute tells its success stories and pitches its ideas so that it is continually able to address the needs of some of the poorest people in the world, people who produce and who eat rice. source:  http://irri.org/global-effort/poverty-is-where-rice-is-grown This photo, for instance, is a good example of how the institute tells stories. It's the type that caters most likely to intellectuals, academicians... after all, look at how poor people have been reduced to dots on the world map. Yes, it is a highly in...

On rare occasions, I get a request from Management to "cater" snacks for the Board of Trustees. This was one of those occasions... But there's a caveat: I wasn't supposed to prepare the typical, academic rice tasting session. The DDG-R, Jackie, wanted me to approach this as food service rather than an experiment. So inspired by Madrid Fusion Manila 2017 , I prepared vision boards to inspire me about the pegs. What the colour motif would be; what would be the presentation style; what would be the rice varieties to be featured... Good thing I got Ana, Tita Nollie, and Ate Lucy to help out in mise-en-place. It was so much fun seeing my idea come to life in a span of two hours. The table was so different from the other set-ups I've done before that this latest one was actually Instagrammable! I was surprised! Will we do this again soon? We'll find out.