Asian Institute of Management: the Description and Brief History

DESCRIPTION OF THE INSTITUTION

ASIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT

BRIEF HISTORY

In 1966, Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University, and the Philippine Inter-University Consortium receive a grant from the Ford Foundation. With the grant, and the donations of the Eugenio López Foundation and the Ayala Corporation, the consortium, and the Harvard group, establish the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) on 1968. The next year, AIM admits its first students, to the Master in Business Administration program, then called as the Master in Business Management.

Program. Over the years, AIM opens more programs i.e.: Master in Management, Rural Development Program, Master in Development Management, Executive Master of Business Administration, and Master of Entrepreneurship. Some notable years are in 1975 when former President Ferdinand Marcos signs the Presidential Decree 639, which formalizes AIM’s international character; and on 2004, when AIM becomes the first school in Southeast Asia to receive accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

ANALYTICS, COMPUTING, AND COMPLEX SYSTEMS LABORATORY

I. DESCRIPTION

On the 8th of March 2018, the Asian Institute of Management officially launches the Analytics, Computing and Complex Systems Laboratory or ACCeSs lab. The ACCeSs Lab is designed with data analytics, artificial intelligence in mind with the goal of ultimately being a bridge between public-private research and development collaboration to create solutions to business and societal problems. The organizational structure of the laboratory is relatively flat, although the still exists some sort of hierarchy. Starting with Dr. Christopher Monterola, Ph.D. which is the executive managing director of the lab and the current head of the School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship.

The next, is Dr. Erika Fille T. Legara, Ph.D., which is the deputy director, and the master of science in data science academic program director. The next to be introduced are Dr. Christian M. Alis, Ph.D., and Eduardo L. David Jr, which are the senior data scientist and data engineer respectively. Next to be listed are rest of the data scientists which are Dr. Josephine Jill T. Cabatbat, Ph.D., Dr. Antonio Paguirigan Jr, Ph.D., and Benjur Emmanuel Borja. Next are the research associates which are Nissa Marie Toledo, and Erwin P. Obias; and laboratory associate, Arielle Ramirez.

II. THE SUPER COMPUTER

The supercomputer, internally dubbed as Jojie is the main attraction of the ACCeSs lab. Jojie, which was generously donated by the StanShih Foundation, spearheaded by the Acer founder and Acer Honorary Chairman, Stan Shih. Jojie has a maximum computing power of 500 teraflops and a storage capacity of 500 terabytes. The computing power of Jojie joins the ranks along with the fastest supercomputer in the ASEAN region.

III. MASTER OF SCIENCE IN DATA SCIENCE

The Master of in Data Science of the Asian Institute of Management is a 14-month program that has been created specifically to produce intellectuals for the fastest-growing specialization worldwide. The program is designed to meet the needs of modern businesses in the age of “big data”. Therefore, the students will be working closely with business and management to learn to create the correct questions, gather the appropriate data, analyze with the correct techniques, and finally present a working solution. In addition to that, all the MSDS students will have access to the ACCeSs lab, filled with excellent, professors, which are experts in the field and knowledgeable of the problems encountered in the real world. Not to mention access to Jojie, the supercomputer which enables them to compute an almost endless amount of calculations dealing with the machine and deep learning applications.

AN ASSESSMENT OF THE INTERNSHIP

The internship at the Asian Institute of Management, specifically at the Analytics, Computing, and Complex Systems Laboratory has been an excellent one. As it gives you an accurate representation of the workplace wherein data scientists and data engineers work from, along with the excellent mentors and professors that will guide you every step of the way. In doing so, I learned a lot from this internship, from learning how to use Pandas, the Python standard for data-frame manipulation to t-SNE, an algorithm that reduces data dimensionality thus enabling plotting at a lower dimension. Then, comes working with the supercomputer, Jojie which was excellent because it enabled me to perform computations which previously cannot be run by my laptop quickly or cannot be run at all. Although the most important ones are the mentors, because they truly are experts in their field and helped me out a lot because as I realized throughout the internship, I really did not know what I was doing, and I did not know what I needed to do further to complete the study, thus my supervisor, Dr. Christian Alis really helped me in completing this study.

As my study revolves under tropical cyclones and their path and trajectory, my background in statistics and complex systems really helped in thinking of ways on how to attack the problem and analyze the data. Although other than that, what I did for my internship really did not correlate to the lessons I learned from the classes I took at the university, as most of what I did are things I learned on my own along with my thesis adviser Prof. Jason Albia. I wanted to be an intern as AIM because I already considered data science as a possible career path after I graduate from BS Applied Physics at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. After this internship, I believe that data science is the correct path to take going forward, as I believe that data scientists will be the best profession in the early age of ‘big data’ and that I should join the race early to get a head start on the future.