Three researchers from the Kalinga-Apayao State College were sent by College President Eduardo Bagtang to Ilo-ilo City for a three-day conference from February 27-29. Simply dubbed as The International Research Conference, the activity highlighted the response of higher education and research institutions to the challenges of globalization through research. Hosted by the Western Visayas State University, it gathered research papers from different higher education institutions, both private and government-run, both from the Philippines and other countries. The activity reviewed the state of the art of researches in seven areas: Science, Math and Technology; Medicine and Health; Agriculture and Allied Fields; Media and Communication; Information Technology and Engineering; Teacher Education; and Humanities and Social Sciences.
KASC submitted a number of research papers and three of them were admitted for oral presentation: “Project Development Through GIS and Developing Based Maps Using DEM Satellite Image, “GIS-Based Agroforestry system of Kalinga” by Forester Emerson Barcellano (admitted under the Agriculture and Allied Fields Cluster), and Rural Communication channels Utilized for the Promotion of Agricultural Technologies in Tabuk” by Marciano Paroy Jr. (under the Media and Communication Cluster).
The KASC team, along with other presenters from Cordillera, was able to give other big universities a feeler of the research atmosphere in this region.
As additional highlight of the activity, plenary sessions were interspersed into the simultaneous oral presentations in the different clusters. Dr. Thao Le, Director of Linguistics University of Tasmania in Australia, discussed the power of language in shaping culture; Dr. Amin Sarkar, Professor of Economics from the Alabama A & M University in USA discussed the changing patterns in world economics; Dr. Jaime Z. Galvez Tan, from University of the Philippines, discussed medicine and health trends; Dr. Mina Ramirez, President of the Asian Social Institute, looked into emerging social problems encountered in the world today; Dr. Roland Buresh, from the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, dissected problems on food scarcity and the role of rice; Dr. Florangel Braid, from the Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication, ended the sessions with the potent role of communication in advancing development.