Budget Services Office · Artificial Intelligence Module

A smart, locally hosted assistant designed to help PUP budget officers navigate daily expenditures, financial policies, and strategic planning — all while keeping sensitive university data completely private and on-site.

Polytechnic University of the Philippines · Est. 1904

pup.edu.ph / princess
P.R.I.N.C.E.S.S. chat interface, live on the PUP AI Module
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01 — The Name

Behind every letter is a core responsibility.

P.R.I.N.C.E.S.S. is more than a catchy acronym — it's a clear breakdown of what she’s built to do:

P
PUP
R
Resource
I
Intelligence
N
Navigating
C
Campus
E
Expenditure
S
Strategic
S
Spending

Full form: PUP Resource Intelligence for Navigating Campus Expenditure and Strategic Spending.

02 — First Principles

There are three ways to put an LLM to work.

An LLM is a prediction engine trained on massive text to generate human-like responses. How you access it decides where your data goes.

01 / WEBSITES
Gemini, ChatGPT
Easiest to use, best for general daily tasks — but every prompt is sent to a third-party company's servers.
Data leaves campus
02 / APIS
Connect to software
Wires AI directly into existing workflows and tools. Built for developers and custom automation.
Still external
03 / LOCAL
Ollama, Dify — on-premise
Runs entirely on university-owned hardware. Total privacy, offline capability, no recurring usage fees.
Data stays on campus
Diagram comparing three ways to access large language models
Fig. 01 — Access FrameworkBSO · AI Module
03 — The Landscape

PUP isn't starting from zero — and neither is the sector.

PUP · Live
SINTA
The official PUP Helpdesk Chatbot — real-time, student-facing support, already trusted with routine inquiries.
Helpdesk / FAQ
DOST · 2026
NAICRI
A planned national hub for AI research, advanced computing, and innovation — signaling where institutional AI is headed.
Feb 23, 2026
Gov · Query System
iTANONG
Lets users query a government database and generate insights in Filipino, English, or Taglish.
Multilingual RAG
UST · Peer Institution
Gemini Pro access
Thomasians received free 12-month access to Google Gemini Pro — the "buy" path taken by a peer university.
The Varsitarian
PUP SINTA chatbot alongside iTANONG and Varsitarian coverage of campus AI
Fig. 02 — Existing AI FootprintSINTA · iTANONG · UST
04 — Research Foundation

Two PUP studies already point the way.

Local research on Filipino-optimized models and public-sector LLM deployment gives this project a running start.

FiLLM
Maminta, Enriquez, Nunez, Dela Fuente — College of Computer and Information Sciences
A Filipino-optimized LLM built on SeaLLM-7B 2.5, fine-tuned with LoRA and trained on diverse Filipino datasets for NER, POS tagging, dependency parsing, and summarization.
CalamanCy still outperforms FiLLM in several linguistic tasks — but FiLLM proves a scalable foundation for Filipino NLP is achievable in-house.
LGU Assistant
Jonabelle Labapie — MIT, College of Technology
An LLM deployed for local government service delivery, addressing delays, inefficient tracking, and repetitive inquiries — built using Agile Scrum.
4.67
Usability
4.55
Usefulness
4.49
Reliability
Summary of PUP research on FiLLM and LGU large language model implementation
Fig. 03 — PUP Research RecordFiLLM · LGU Assistant
05 — The Decision

Buy vs. build: why local autonomy matters.

For a university, self-hosting is more than a cost decision — it's a stance on data sovereignty and academic integrity.

01
Data security & privacy
No data ever leaves the university's premises. Protects proprietary research, student records, and sensitive administrative information.
02
Institutional autonomy
Avoids vendor lock-in and external dependencies. Full control over model versions, fine-tuning, and security protocols.
03
Educational potential
An internal sandbox for researchers and students to experiment and fine-tune on institutional datasets.
Tier
GPU Option
Why it works for a 30B model
Key Benefit
Budget / Value
2× RTX 3090 (24GB each)
48GB total VRAM. Two cards split the model via tensor parallelism, with headroom for a 50-user context window.
Cost-effective high capacity
High Performance
1× RTX 5090 (32GB)
The current consumer king. 32GB is the sweet spot — fits a 30B model at Q4 with room for high-concurrency KV cache.
Best balance of power & efficiency
Pro / Workstation
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada (48GB)
Professional-grade stability and large VRAM, ideal for 24/7 reliability in administrative and research workloads.
Maximum stability

Target: 50 concurrent users, prioritizing VRAM capacity and memory bandwidth for low-latency performance.

Buy vs build infographic on local autonomy and hardware guide for a 30B model
Fig. 04 — Hardware Guide, 30B ModelBudget · High-Perf · Pro
06 — The Guardrails

Why accuracy & security matter for a budget assistant.

A confident wrong answer in finance means overspending, compliance violations, and audit failures.

Accuracy — AI hallucinations
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
The assistant searches only approved, official documents. If the answer isn't found, it says "I don't know" — instead of inventing one.
Verifiable citations
Every answer cites the exact document and page number used, so it can be checked in seconds.
Human-in-the-loop
AI assists, but humans decide. Budget officers review, verify, and approve every financial decision and report.
Security — data privacy
Local hosting, on-premise
The AI runs entirely within PUP's secured IT environment — staff salaries, department decisions, and grant allocations never touch a third-party API.
Data sovereignty
No data, prompts, or chat histories leave the local server or the university network.
Integrated security
Works behind PUP firewalls. Access controlled via SSO and role-based permissions — authorized users only.
Why accuracy and security matter for the budget AI assistant
Fig. 05 — Trust ArchitectureRAG · Citations · On-Premise
07 — In Summary

Campus-hosted. Document-backed. Human-driven.

By running strictly on university hardware and pulling answers directly from official policy documents, P.R.I.N.C.E.S.S. gives budget officers an assistant they can actually rely on — with every source right there to prove it.

Polytechnic University of the Philippines  ·  Budget Services Office  ·  AI Module