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About Rachel Edita Oñate Roxas
2023 NEWS!
Dr. Roxas was named among the top 1000 scientists in the Philippines by the AD Scientific Index 2023 https://www.adscientificindex.com/top-100-scientist/?s=400&country_code=ph with a country rank of 450th+ place (across all fields), based on her h-index of 12 and total citations of 670+
2022 NEWS!
Dr. Roxas has been selected as the ASEAN member state national finalist representing the Philippines in the senior scientist category of the ASEAN Women in Science 2022 awards (organized by ASEAN through COSTI, USAID, and the Underwriters Laboratories). More details at:
https://asean.org/2022-science-prize-for-women-announces-finalists/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OJt6CHrkbE
Rachel Edita Oñate Roxas is a Full Professor at the Institute of Computer Science, College of Arts and Sciences of the University of the Philippines Los Baños.
Dr. Roxas is a fellow of Ideacorp, "an independent, non-profit organization that is devoted to research, training and advocacy on development issues, particularly on the use of ICT for development (ICT4D)". She handled subjects and mentoring as a part-time faculty member of the Department of Educational Leadership and Management, Brother Andrew Gonzalez College of Education (BAGCED), DLSU, and School of Management and Information Technology, College of Saint Benilde during the early months of 2023.
Dr. Roxas is the former Vice President for Research and Development of National University (Philippines) national-u.edu.ph until June 2022. She has been the Vice President for Academic Affairs from Academic Year 2014 to 2019. Top-level achievement: Development of a University research culture where the University is being true to its vision and mission statement to be an institution of higher learning where knowledge is not only transmitted from teachers to students, but an environment where knowledge is produced and generated by members of the University community. University administrators and faculty members should be at the forefront of knowledge generation in this new knowledge society and knowledge economy. Dr. Roxas institutionalized programs, offices, policies and guidelines, towards achieving international recognition. Here are some of the University’s milestones of which Dr. Roxas was a major contributor and/or main mover:
CHED Recognition of NU as a Center of Excellence in IT Education in 2017, making the University among the top 1% ITE HEIs in the country; CHED Recognition of NU as an Autonomous HEI in 2019; CHED permit to offer new degree programs such as MS in Computer Science, Masters in IT, and PhD in Computer Science, to name a few; http://www.ched.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/38.pdf
International recognition of the research outputs of the NU community through the indexing of these outputs in the Scopus research database, listing NU among the top Ph Universities in internationally-recognized research databases;
Institutionalization of programs and offices, policies and guidelines;
And on top of these administrative duties, Dr. Roxas painstakingly made her own contributions to all these. Check out the Research page of this site.
Dr Roxas is a former Dean and Associate Professor of Computer Science of the De La Salle University-Manila, and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of the Philippines at Los Banos, respectively, both for 14 years in each university. While at UPLB, she has been instrumental in the opening of Computer Science degree programs at UP Manila, UP Cebu, UP Visayas Miag-ao, and UP Mindanao, through the Regional Units and Outreach Division of the Institute of Computer Science, College of Arts and Sciences, UPLB.
Dr Roxas obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Australian National University, with Professor Malcolm Newey as supervisor with PhD dissertation on Proving the Correctness of Program Transformations using Higher Order Logic. She obtained her Graduate Diploma in Computer Science also from the Australian National University, and her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science cum laude from the University of the Philippines at Los Banos.
Her research interests lie in understanding (1) how new technologies can be used to represent and process natural languages, and (2) how daily use of computers can be enhanced through the use of natural language interfaces.
Dr Roxas pioneered Natural Language Processing (NLP) Research in the country since 1993, about some decades ago, and has been instrumental in the NLP development in the country. Through Artificial Intelligence methodologies, Dr. Roxas and her network of NLP researchers are at the forefront of the development of technologies for participatory governance in the areas of health, disaster risk reduction management, to name a few. See details at https://sites.google.com/site/roxasreo/home/research
Dr. Roxas also functions as a Technical Panel expert for Computer Science for PCIEERD, Department of Science and Technology (DOST) from around 1990s to present. Dr. Roxas is also active in leading Higher Educational Institutions in the country in the development of computing curricular offerings by her involvement with the CHED Technical Panel for IT Education as a member and with the Technical Committee for Computer Science as Chair. She is also active in the Board of their computing professional organization, Computing Society of the Philippines, as President from 2017 to 2022, and has been instrumental in the establishment of the Special Interest Group on NLP and Special Interest Group on Women in Computing. She is also an active member of the ACM Women in Computing Asian Pacific region chapter as a Philippine representative and as the celebrations chair. See details at https://sites.google.com/site/roxasreo/home/community-engagement She has been an active member of the Computing Accreditation Commission (CAC) under the PCS Information and Computing Accreditation Board (PICAB) http://www.philippinecomputersociety.org/picab2/ as Chair/Co-Chair/Committee chair.
Dr Roxas also completed her Ph.D. in Education major in Educational Leadership and Management in 2013 from the De La Salle University. She also gained top #7 (among 57,723 examinees) in the Licensure Examination for Teachers (or LET) conducted by the Philippine Regulatory Commission which was released last October 2007.