Starting Academic Year 2026--2027, UP ISC launched a set of strategic initiatives led by its leadership as part of the Center's evolving strategic direction. The following projects serve as broad strategic umbrellas under which smaller projects, collaborations, publications, events, tools, and other related activities may be developed and coordinated.
AI tools were used in generating the photos and descriptions of the initiatives below. The authors have reviewed and take full responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of the final text.
Archipelagic Intelligence: Towards sovereign & human-centered AI
Program Lead: Dr. Paul Rossener Regonia
Collaborators: Dr. Benedict Salazar OIgado, Dr. Johnrob Bantang, Dr. Paul Samuel Ignacio, Dr. May Anne Mata
What might AI sovereignty look like when it is grounded in Filipino language, culture, and institutions rather than imported as a finished product? What kinds of evidence and practice do we need to answer that question, instead of simply inheriting other countries’ answers? Archipelagic Intelligence is UP ISC’s multi-year program to develop and evaluate artificial intelligence for the Philippine context through three lenses: AI as a Solution, AI as a Challenge, and AI as a Social Good. As a Solution, it backs transdisciplinary projects where AI helps address concrete problems in Filipino mental health, multilingual and archipelagic communication, public service delivery, education, and inclusive access to services. As a Challenge, it confronts risks and burdens—public mistrust and over‑reliance, opaque automated decision systems, and the energy and water costs of AI infrastructures. As a Social Good, it asks how AI can be governed as a kind of commons: built, steered, and shared for public benefit rather than left solely to proprietary platforms. Archipelagic Intelligence is UP ISC’s contribution to UP’s articulation and implementation of AI sovereignty, aligning institutional research with an emerging system‑wide architecture for AI governance, shared research services, and strategic collaborations.
Architectures of Access: Intelligent service delivery and resource orchestration in high-demand public systems
Program Lead: Dr. May Anne Mata
Collaborators: Dr. Benedict Salazar OIgado, Dr. Johnrob Bantang
What does a society lose when access to vital public goods—from emergency care to essential civic rights—is routinely stalled by systemic friction and static queues? Architectures of Access establishes a scalable queue intelligence and analytics platform for smart campuses and high-demand public service institutions. More than mere inconvenience in crowded clinics, campuses, and government offices, excessive waiting can mean missed care, delayed decisions, and the quiet exclusion of those who cannot afford to stay in line. Using the University of the Philippines as a living laboratory, the initiative harmonizes data-driven queuing applications while welcoming compatible sub-initiatives designed to optimize public service delivery and operational flow. Treating service environments as complex adaptive systems, the project integrates queueing theory, operations research, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. By leveraging anonymized operational data, it builds mathematical models, simulation frameworks, and predictive AI tools to estimate waiting times, pinpoint service bottlenecks, and inform dynamic staffing and resource allocation. Following pilot deployments across university campuses and partner public institutions, this decision-support infrastructure will adapt and scale to hospitals, local government units, and national agencies—with the aim of fostering equitable access, operational efficiency, and dignified service delivery across the public sector.
Computational Biology: Addressing Problems in Biodiversity, Genomics, and Evolution through Computational Methods and Data Analytics
Program Lead: Dr. May Anne Mata
Collaborators: Dr. Johnrob Bantang
Computational Biology is a flagship initiative under UP ISC’s Complexity Science Division that brings together expertise in biology, data science, mathematical modeling, and computational methods. Dedicated to strengthening linkages and increasing collaboration between biology and computational groups, the program focuses on identifying biological problems where computation, analytics, and modeling serve as the primary solution. The initiative addresses complex biological systems across biodiversity, population genetics, evolutionary biology, and large-scale genomic datasets, exploring how domain-driven biological questions lead to novel mathematical and computational insights—from the phylodynamic analysis of viral genomic sequences to epidemic dynamics and ecological modeling. Operating through a challenge-driven framework, the program connects biological researchers providing domain expertise and data with data science students and modelers for co-advising, thesis supervision, and collaborative R&D. By integrating research datasets, data hosting infrastructure, and cross-campus mentorship, Computational Biology builds local capacity to address pressing national and global research gaps in the life sciences.
Enactive, Embodied, Extended: Emergent intelligences for living futures
Program Lead: Dr. Diego Silang Maranan
Collaborators: Dr. Johnrob Bantang, Dr. May Anne Mata, Dr. Paul Rossener Regonia
Enactive, Embodied, Extended is UP ISC’s transdisciplinary program for probing how intelligence takes shape across bodies, tools, environments, and more-than-human ecologies. Grounded in cognitive science and animated by artscience, it combines speculative design, digital humanities, and practice-led inquiry to create works that are at once prototypes, performances, and probes. The program explores sensory and somaesthetic experience, archipelagic and fluid relations, and ecological entanglements through installations, wearables, living media, and computational experiments. Drawing inspiration from projects such as Biomodd and related art-science collaborations, it treats making as a mode of thinking and analysis as a form of creative practice, using frontier technologies to investigate how cognition, care, and collective futures emerge in situated, postcolonial contexts.
Futures of Culture: Complexity Approaches to Living Heritage and Social Dynamics
Program Lead: Dr. May Anne Mata
Collaborators: Dr. Diego Silang Maranan
Futures of Culture investigates how cultural practices, memory, and social fabrics evolve as complex, living adaptive systems. Starting with Mindanao as a a site and primary, multi-ethnic living landscape—and expanding across the broader Global South—the collaborative moves beyond reductive methodologies, honoring culture as a dynamic web of identity, oral tradition, and community resilience that cannot be flattened into static variables. By integrating complexity science, computational social science, and qualitative humanities research, the initiative examines the emergent patterns of living traditions, language dynamics, and intercultural interactions under the pressures of globalization and digital transformation. Ultimately, Futures of Culture establishes an interdisciplinary research framework to map, preserve, and safeguard diverse heritage—centering Global South perspectives in shaping future-oriented cultural policy, social cohesion, and systemic resilience.
Mapping Data Ecologies: Exploring and enhancing institutional repositories
Program Lead: Dr. Johnrob Bantang
Collaborators: Dr. Paul Samuel Ignacio, Dr. Andrew Bañas
Mapping Data Ecologies evaluates and modernizes the landscape of academic and sovereign research data infrastructure across the Philippines. By benchmarking open-source repository frameworks alongside existing institutional practices—including UP ISC's Dataverse installation—this initiative audits data-sharing pipelines to identify critical gaps in metadata standardization, persistent identification, and long-term storage scalability. Grounded in the operationalization of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles, the program establishes ethically sound guidelines for dataset licensing, access tiering, and domestic data governance. Beyond diagnostic mapping, Mapping Data Ecologies serves as the foundational data backbone for the university's computational research ecosystem—ensuring that datasets, models, and derived variables generated across national initiatives are systematically cataloged, interconnected, and preserved for public good.
PULSE: Designing Human-Centered Public Information Systems
Program Lead: Dr. Benedict Salazar Olgado
Collaborators: Dr. Diego Silang Maranan
Public information systems—from government portals and university repositories to AI-enabled civic tools—have become the primary channels through which citizens exercise rights, access services, and engage with institutions. Yet these systems are often evaluated solely through technical indicators like uptime or feature completeness, rather than human outcomes. PULSE starts from a different premise: a pulse is a sign of life, and the true measure of a public system lies in how well it serves the people who depend on it.Treating digital infrastructures as living public assets, this initiative applies human-centered research to evaluate system health not as a one-time audit, but as an ongoing process of learning, responsiveness, and care. Combining human-computer interaction, information science, and participatory design across the University of the Philippines, government agencies, and civil society, PULSE develops methods, tools, and partnerships to bring the human pulse back into digital governance—ensuring public technologies remain accessible, trustworthy, inclusive, and committed to the public good.
Silicon Substrates: Towards a national intelligent systems infrastructure roadmap
Program Lead: Dr. Johnrob Bantang
Collaborators: Dr. Paul Rossener Regonia, Francis Paolo Santelices, MS
Silicon Substrates establishes a national strategic roadmap for the physical hardware, high-performance computing (HPC), and network infrastructure required to sustain sovereign Philippine AI capabilities. As advanced computational models demand unprecedented processing power and physical infrastructure, relying exclusively on foreign cloud architectures creates critical vulnerabilities in security, data latency, and national autonomy. This initiative conducts a comprehensive national audit of local GPU clusters, server facilities, edge computing nodes, and energy-efficient data center readiness across academic, government, and industry sectors. By mapping hardware bottlenecks and forecasting computational demand, Silicon Substrates formulates the policy, investment, and technical blueprints needed to anchor a resilient national compute grid—ensuring that the physical hardware powering Philippine intelligent systems remains secure, sustainable, and under sovereign stewardship.
The Evidence Engine: Sustaining challenge-driven data science
Program Lead: Dr. Paul Samuel Ignacio
Collaborators: Dr. Benedict Salazar OIgado, Dr. Johnrob Bantang
How can complex, high-priority public questions be systematically transformed into durable, reusable evidence for national benefit? The Evidence Engine is UP ISC’s program to institutionalize a recurring, question-to-evidence cycle for the Philippines. Moving beyond one-off hackathons or fragmented studies, the initiative turns critical societal challenges into a sustained engine for dataset-centered research and public-interest knowledge. In each annual cycle, the Data Science Division identifies a pressing national or institutional issue, translates it into rigorous data requirements, and releases a curated, versioned, and ethically governed dataset. UP ISC then publishes a foundational anchor paper that establishes baseline analyses, computational benchmarks, and remaining open questions. This anchor study serves as the foundation for a competitive call for complementary research, inviting interdisciplinary teams to extend, validate, or challenge the baseline findings. Selected projects form a coordinated portfolio whose research outputs—including models, code, derived variables, and annotations—are returned to the UP ISC Data Commons. By connecting challenge providers with shared data, anchor papers, and annual syntheses, The Evidence Engine builds lasting infrastructure for evidence-informed decision-making. (NB: AI-generated; for review of program champion before publishing.)
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