Bulan attends Wolfram Science Summer School

Filed under News 

Katherine Bulan

Katherine Bulan, a fourth year undergraduate member of the Complex Systems Group, attends this year's Wolfram Science School from June 25-July 13, 2012 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Bulan is one of the 40 students invited to join the activities hosted by Wolfram Science, the company behind the scientific software Mathematica. Stephen Wolfram, the author of the book A New Kind of Science (NKS) and creator of Mathematica, is the host and overall Director of the school, heading a faculty of researchers and innovators from the industry and academia.

More about the school here.

The Global Lab: Interview with Dr. Legara on framing research

Filed under Research Features

An Interview with The Global Lab
 "News on Vitruvian Man on Ice, visualising the Eurozone crisis, Faster than Light Neutrinos and the European Conference on Complex Systems, and we speak to Erika Fille Legara about Media Framing in the Philippines." (Listen here)

The Global Lab is a podcast about cities, global connectivity and the impact of technology produced by the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (UCL-CASA). The UCL Beacon Bursary scheme generously provided start-up funds for recording equipment. - http://www.thegloballab.com/about/

Complexity & the Philippine Society

Erika Fille T. Legara, Ph.D.
(This article appeared as a two-part series in the STAR SCIENCE section of The Philippine Star)
Filed under General Interest

About the author: Erika Fille Legara, Ph.D. is currently doing a post-doctoral stint at the Institute of High Performance Computing under the Cross-Disciplinary Data-Intensive Analytics group in Singapore. She finished her Ph.D. in Physics at the National Institute of Physics in UP Diliman under the mentorship of UPD Chancellor Caesar Saloma and Assoc. Prof. Christopher Monterola. She graduated as the 2011 Most Outstanding Graduate Student of the UPD College of Science; at the same time, she was presented with the Edgardo Gomez Excellence in Dissertation Award. In June 2010, she was admitted to Santa Fe Institute’s highly competitive Complex Systems Summer School as a scholar. Prior to her post-doctoral stint, she was an assistant professor at the NIP-UPD. She may be contacted via her Gmail account etlegara.






“The 21st century will be the century of complexity.” – Stephen Hawking


In the aftermath of the recent season finale of the American Idol, a scientific paper by F. Ciulla et al. titled “Beating the news using Social Media: the case study of American Idol”, which was initially uploaded to arXiv, was circulated around the web and even featured in some of our local news websites. The paper presents methods to analyze sentiments and voting behaviors of individuals by assessing readily-available data from Twitter within the period of the TV show's season finale. The results are interesting as they were able to provide some forecast on the final outcome of the competition. More interesting, it seems, is the fact that all five (5) authors of the said paper are from the Department of Physics of Northeastern University in Boston. Yes, Physics. What do physicists have to do with sentiment and voting behavior analysis of individuals in a society?

IPL holds general meeting for 2012

Filed under News

To discuss issues and plan ahead for the coming semester, the Instrumentation Physics Laboratory (IPL), led by its coordinator, Dr. Maricor Soriano, conducted the first reorganizational meeting for the academic year on June 11, 2012.

Among the things discussed in the general meeting are recruitment and workshop schedules, the first sem being the recruitment season for the Lab. The process to hire new members will start on June 14 with a campaign for third year BS Physics and BS Applied Physics students, and will culminate in the deliberation by the IPL Staff by mid-August. Graduate students who have finished their core courses can also apply for IPL membership.

IPL, or Instru to its members, is still one of the biggest laboratories in terms of number of personnel despite recent departures from members for work and postdoc research. According to Dr. Soriano, the Lab is now composed of 8 Senior Staff and 38 student members. A workshop for the entire lab, something that has not been conducted in the last few years, is being planned to cap the recruitment activities and welcome new and old members alike.

More news from IPL can be found here.

Dr. Roxas-Villanueva joins UPLB Physics Faculty

Filed under News

Dr. Ranzivelle Marianne
Roxas-Villanueva

Dr. Ranzivelle Marianne Roxas-Villanueva, a long-time IPL and Complex Systems Group member, moves to the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB) starting this academic year. She is joined by her husband, Dr. Anthony Villanueva, in going to the UPLB Institute of Mathematical Science and Physics (IMSP).

Dr. Roxas-Villanueva, who is one of the main researchers in the field of Physics Education, joined the Video and Image Processing Group during her undergraduate studies. After a teaching stint in her home province, she returns to the IPL under the Complex Systems and Synchronization Groups of Dr. Christopher Monterola and Dr. Giovanni Tapang, respectively, where she conducted experimental and theoretical work on a modified peer instruction method. Her interests also include semantic networks, social systems, and fractal pattern formations.

Dr. Bantang takes on group leadership

Filed under News 

Dr. Johnrob Bantang

Dr. Johnrob Bantang now heads the Complex Systems Group with the departure of Dr. Christopher Monterola for a Singaporean complexity team.

Dr. Bantang, also the Director of the University of the Philippines Computer Center (UPCC), will be joined by Dr. Anthony Longjas, Dr. Marissa Pastor, and Dr. Jesus Felix Valenzuela in mentoring the five graduate students and the six undergraduate students of the group.

One of the last few IPL researchers who have background both in optics (the original IPL research concentration) and complexity, Dr. Johnrob Bantang now specializes in a diverse set of topics. His interests include: Complex systems: granular matter mixing, segregation, and heap stability; cellular automata model of dynamical systems, chaotic systems, complex networks and social dynamics; ordinary differential equation model of virus-cell interaction; Membrane system simulation using Brane calculus formalism; Optics and imaging: focused light propagation and imaging through turbid media.

More information about Dr. Bantang from his NIP page.