Chris Monterola

Current Positions

  • School Head, Professor, Aboitiz Chair in Data Science
    Aboitiz School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (SITE)
    Asian Institute of Management, Philippines

  • Founding Executive Managing Director and Principal Scientist
    Analytics, Computing, Complex Systems (ACCeSs) Lab
    Asian Institute of Management, Philippines

  • Program Director
    Ph.D. in Data Science
    Asian Institute of Management, Philippines

Other Active Positions

  • Academician, National Academy of Science and Technology, Philippines (June 2020 - present)

  • Independent Director (November 2022 - present)
    Xurpas, Inc. (PSE:X)

  • Board of Trustees Member
    Unilab Foundation

  • International Advisory Board Member
    Center for Integrated STEM Inc.

  • Policy Advisor
    DTI National AI Roadmap, NEDA/ADB Philippine Development Plan 2028
    Various enterprises and organizations on Digital Transformation

Previous Positions

  • Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Complexity Institute, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. (October 2015-2020)

  • Senior Scientist and Capability Group Manager of the Complex Systems (CxSy) Capability Group, Computing Science Department, Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR, Singapore (August 2013-August 2017)

  • Principal Investigator/Scientific Director, Complex Systems Programme, A*STAR Urban Systems Initiative (2012-present)

  • Associate Professor 7, National Institute of Physics, UP Diliman (2005-2012)

  • Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden (2003-2005)

Biography

Chris is a physicist and machine learning scientist, educator, entrepreneur, and technology advisor for various enterprises and organizations. He sits on the board of Xurpas, Inc. (PSE:X), a publicly listed technology company that has offered innovative IT products and services for the past twenty years. Dr. Monterola is also a NAST Academician who holds an Aboitiz Chair in Data Science and a Professorship at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM). He is also AIM's Head of the Aboitiz School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (ASITE). ASITE is the newest of the four schools of AIM that houses four academic programs: MS in Data Science, Masters in Innovation and Business, Masters in Entrepreneurship, and PhD in Data Science. Under ASITE is also an advanced analytics industry-facing research lab—the Analytics, Computing, and Complex Systems (ACCeSs) lab, where he is the Executive Managing Director. To date, Chris has mentored over 200 data scientists, spread across different sectors, private and public.

Before AIM

Prior to joining AIM, Dr. Monterola was a Senior Scientist at the Institute of High Performance Computing in the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR) — Singapore’s lead government agency for fostering world-class scientific research. He was the Capability Group Manager (CGM) of the Complex Systems (CxSy) Capability Group at the IHPC. Chris was also the Principal Investigator and Scientific Director of the Complexity Science Programme (CSP) of the IHPC under the CxSy. The CSP was one of the programs under a bigger umbrella that is the A*STAR Urban Systems Initiative. Prior to his stint in Singapore, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems. He obtained a Ph.D. in Physics in 2002 from the National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD) where he was an Associate Professor 7. He was also the Coordinator of the Instrumentation Physics Laboratory (IPL), a leading physics research group in the Philippines.

Aside from teaching in UPD, he also mentored and advised physics students (14 MS, 9 PhDs) on their research theses/dissertations. To date, he has advised/co-advised more than 30 students who have already successfully obtained various academic degrees. In 2008 and 2011 respectively, Chris received the Achievement award from the National Research Council of the Philippines (NRCP) and the Outstanding Young Scientist Award (OYS) from the DOST National Academy of Science and Technology because of his significant contributions to science and technology in the country. Also in 2011, he was an awardee of the NAST's Talent Search for Young Scientist Award.

In 2009, the SEA-EU-NET organized a mapping study of excellent researchers from the ASEAN member countries with the objective of raising "awareness for the existence of high-quality research" and presenting "a pool of excellent researchers in Southeast Asia." It featured Chris as one of the very few excellent researchers in the region.

Research

His research expertise involved: Modeling Complex Systems, Computational Physics, Complex Networks, Neural Networks, Biological Physics, and Forecasting. Chris' group's research in UP focuses on the following fields: Landslide and Granular Dynamics, Social networks, Physics Education, Biological Networks, Public Opinion Research, Neural Networks, and Econophysics. The image below qualitatively shows the frequency distribution of the top 100 words used across all the abstracts of his publications in ISI-indexed journals. The word cloud was generated using Wordle.

Last update of Awards and Publications lists below: 2019

Awards

  • 2016 Country Prize Winner (Singapore), United Nation Global Pulse's The Big IDEAS Competition for Sustainable Cities and Urban Communities, June 2016. EF Legara, C Monterola, JF Valenzuela. [presentation]

  • 2016 SMRT Most Innovative Solution Award, IHPC (from CxSy MA Ramli, V Jayaraman, G Lee, C Monterola), SMRT Vendors' Day, 30 March 2016.

  • 2014 ICCS Best Workshop Paper. N Othman, EF Legara, V Selvam, C Monterola, "Simulating Congestion Dynamics of Train Rapid Transit using Smart Card Data," International Conference on Computational Science, Cairns, Australia, 9-12 June 2014.

  • 2013 IEEE SCALE Challenge. First Prize Winner. H Kasim, T Hung, EF Legara, C Monterola, G Lee, X Li, BS Lee, S Lu, L Wang, and V Jayaraman, "Scalable Complex System Modeling for Sustainable City," Sixth IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge (SCALE 2013), Delft, Netherlands, 14-16 May 2013.

  • National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) Outstanding Young Scientists (2011)

  • NAST Talent Search for Young Scientist awardee (2011)

  • Conferred the scientist rank 1 by the University of the Philippines System (2009-present)

  • University of the Philippines Centennial Professorial Chair (2008-2012)

  • National Research Council of the Philippines (NCRP) lifetime achievement award for Physics (2008)

  • Most Outstanding PhD student / Dean`s Medallion / Batch Valedictorian (2002)

  • Edgardo Gomez Award for Excellence in Dissertation Research (2002)

  • Gawad Chanselor : Most Outstanding Graduate Student (Science & Technology Cluster) (2002)

  • Gawad Chanselor: Best Published Research (2002)

  • Most Outstanding Masteral Graduate student –Dean`s Medallion, Batch Valedictorian (1999)

Most Recent Scientific Publications

  • J Sun, R Zhang, L Feng, C Monterola, X Ma, C Rozenblat, HE Stanley, B Podobnik, and Y Hu, "Extreme risk induced by communities in interdependent networks," Communication Physics 2, Issue 1, 2019.

  • B Yang, S Ren, EF Legara, Z Li, YX Ong, L Lin, and C Monterola, "Phase Transition in Taxi Dynamics and Impact of Ridesharing," Transportation Science (accepted April 2019).

  • A Presbitero and C Monterola, "Challenging the evolution of social cooperation in a community governed by central control," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 511, pp. 378-388, 2019.

  • EF Legara and C Monterola, "Inferring Passenger Types from Commuter Eigentravel Matrices," Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics 6, Issue 3, 2018.

  • MA Ramli, V Jayaraman, HC Kwek, KH Tan, GLK Khoon, and C Monterola, "Improved estimation of commuter waiting times using headway and commuter boarding information," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 501, pp. 217-226, 2018.

  • B Yang and C Monterola, "Efficient intersection control for minimally guided vehicles: A self-organised and decentralised approach," Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 72, pp. 283-305, 2016.

  • J Pang and C Monterola, "Dendritic growth model of multilevel marketing," Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation 43, pp. 100–110, 2017.

  • N Hu, EF Legara, GG Hung, KK Lee, and C Monterola, "Impacts of land use and amenities on public transport use, urban planning and design," Land Use Policy 57, pp. 356–367, 2016.

  • B Yang, X Xinhua, ZF Pang, C Monterola, "Cluster Statistics and Quasisoliton Dynamics in Microscopic Optimal Velocity Models," Physical Review E 93: 042212, 2016.

  • HY Xu, G Li, EF Legara, SH Kuo, D Zhao and C Monterola, "Generalized cross entropy method for estimating joint distribution from incomplete information," Physica A 453, Pages 162–172, July 2016.

  • B Yang, L Chea, A Verma and C Monterola, "Self-organized traffic flow at the lightless intersection: algorithms, policies and simulations of the environmental Impact," Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy 18, 2016.

[View complete list]

Past and Upcoming Event(s)