- 01
Jasper Kyle Catapang was born on July 17, 1998 in Marikina City, Metro Manila, Philippines. He spent most of his childhood illustrating, video gaming, and exploring different technologies.
He was a survivor of the onslaught of Typhoon Ondoy in 2009, with flood even submerging the street he resided in.
He got engaged in graphic design by 2010. He has complete mastery of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects. From then on, he developed a strong affinity for multimedia arts. He was recruited by his highschool's student body to be their official audio-video presentation head. As of April 2020, he still lives in Marikina City with his father, mother, and sister.
- 02
Jasper spent his pre-school days in Redeemed in Christ School in Parang, Marikina City. He graduated valedictorian in his batch.
In 2005, he attended Marist School Marikina, located in Marikina Heights, Marikina City. He spent his primary and secondary education there. He was a consistent honor student. He became a news writer during his 7th grade and took up an elective on broadcast communication and journalism during his 10th grade. He became the editor-in-chief of Marist School Marikina's official publication. He graduated highschool as Top 9.
In 2014, he took the admission exams of the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University, and De La Salle University College of Saint Benilde. He passed all four and chose to study BS Computer Science in the University of the Philippines Manila in Ermita, Manila by August 2015.
He was recruited by PLDT Global Company, a subsidiary of Smart, the leading telco in the Philippines, as an intern under the data analytics department on June 2018.
On May 23, 2019, he presented and successfully defended his undergraduate thesis on a bilingual retail chatbot using support vector machines. Jasper finished his tertiary education studies on December 2019.
On March 2020, he has completed his online courses on Machine Learning, offered by Stanford University, Outbreaks and Epidemics, offered by Johns Hopkins University, and Measuring Disease in Epidemiology, offered by Imperial College London.
- 03
Jasper was a data science intern under the data analytics department of PLDT Global Company in Makati City from June 2018 to July 2018. He received referrals and a 1.00 (highest grade) for his performance. He was proven to be highly efficient and had an impeccable sense of time management as revealed by the company and through the interview conducted by his intern adviser, Mr. Greg Baes, a professor in UP Manila specializing in Numerical Analysis and Algorithms and Complexity.
On June 2019, Jasper was employed by Roxas Holdings, Inc. in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig City, as a data scientist and business intelligence developer. He left on December 2019.
He was then hired as the lead of the AI research and development laboratory of Alfafusion Web Technologies Corporation, located in Quezon City, on July 2020, focusing on the application of natural language processing on chatbots.
A month later, August 2020, he was also hired remotely as an AI automation engineer by Monster Group UK, located in York, United Kingdom.
- 04
Jasper's research interests are primarily focused on databases, and machine learning and its applications.
Jasper has submitted two preprints on arXiv, Cornell University's repository of scientific papers. His paper entitled "A collection of database industrial techniques and optimization approaches of database operations" was published on arXiv on September 2018, while his other paper entitled "k-Nearest Neighbor Optimization via Randomized Hyperstructure Convex Hull" was published on arXiv on June 2019.
He presented a paper on natural language processing entitled "A Bilingual Chatbot Using Support Vector Classifier On an Automatic Corpus Engine Dataset" to ICAIIC 2020: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Information and Communication, which was held in Fukuoka, Japan on February 19-21, 2020. He presented it with his undergraduate thesis supervisor, Mr. Geoffrey Solano, who is also his co-author.
On March 2020, he collaborated with Dr. Junie Billones of UP Manila on a drug discovery research for COVID-19. They were able to successfully generate three new ligands for the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro), and four new ligands for the ACE2 receptor, which the virus uses for cell entry.
On July 2020, his Github repository on machine learning entitled "skxplore" has been selected and archived in the Github Arctic Code Vault, located in Svalbard, Norway. This archiving project by Github is the effort of multiple institutions around the world to preserve the most relevant open-source code on the planet.