The School of Sciences, Engineering and Technology, in partnership with PLDT-Smart Foundation, hosted a Data Science Symposium on January 21, 2026. The lectures were delivered by two world-class scientists, who later in the afternoon supervised a hands-on workshop with the Data Science faculty and students to kick off potential research collaboration projects and joint publications.
Dr. Christopher Bernido, a Ramon-Magsaysay Award-winning scientist, presented the mathematical foundation for a memory-modulated white noise framework that he developed. This was followed by a lecture given by Dr. Reinabelle Reyes, the director of the Philippine Space Agency, Space Science Missions Bureau, on the application of the white noise framework to various types of big data, including those related to solar cycles, ageing fibrin gels, nucleotide distributions in bacterial genomes and great barrier reef degradation.
Dr. Bernido received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany, while Dr. Reyes earned her Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Princeton University, where she gained international recognition for her research, which provided a crucial test of Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Four groups of faculty and students worked on and presented their results on the use of the framework on various big data sets.