Noel Bonoan is the Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer of KPMG Philippines. He is also the firm’s Head of Advisory. He is a former Head of Tax, and continues to be a tax principal who counts among his clients MNCs, large domestic corporations and important industry groups. He has been with KPMG since 2007. Prior to his joining KPMG he was an Undersecretary of the Philippines Department of Finance and had oversight over the Bureau of Internal Revenue and Bureau of Customs. While in government he led successful efforts to revamp the country’s internal revenue laws and improve governance in the revenue agencies. For his work he was awarded The Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) in 2004. His background has given him a wealth of insights into Philippine tax policy making him a more effective adviser to his clients. Noel is a lawyer. He has a Juris Doctor from Ateneo de Manila School of Law (Silver Medal Honors) and a Master of Laws in International Economic Law from the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. He graduated from Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. Noel’s passionate interest in how all things digital can power an organization’s growth and help manage its risks has contributed in no small measure to KPMG Philippines’s digital transformation which, he stresses, is always continuing. As Head of Advisory he enthusiastically shares his digital experience with the firm’s clients, helping them on their own journeys. Noel joins us here today to talk about how Artificial Intelligence is changing the business landscape, and how KPMG Philippines has leveraged on AI, for itself and for its clients.

Ria Flora is the Head of Special Projects at Senti AI and a Data Scientist.

At Senti AI, she works with stakeholders throughout the organization to identify opportunities for leveraging company data to drive business solutions. Additionally, she leads the designing and development of solutions, frameworks, and pipelines that fuel the operations of the AI Research Team.

She started exploring the field of Data Science when she attended the 2016 Nanyang Technological University Winter School Introduction to Complexity Science at Singapore to which she represented the De La Salle University Manila’s Physics Department. After completing her Bachelor’s degree in Physics and Economics, she pursued her Master’s degree in Data Science at the Asian Institute of Management.

Upon completing her Master’s degree, she worked on a capstone project in collaboration with a global hard disk drive manufacturer and data storage company. Her notable works involve:

• Network Science study on the network analysis on the Philippines medicinal plants and its corresponding shared medical benefits
• Deep learning project on human resource analytics on company reviews from Glassdoor in collaboration with a human resource company
• Big Data and Cloud Computing project on Filipino dating patterns on Reddit using Frequent Itemset Mining and Natural Language Processing

Prior to being a data scientist, she was an energy trader at a renewable energy company. She also worked with the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) – Rizalino S. Navarro Policy Center as a Research Intern. In her stay with AIM, she worked on a research, in collaboration with the center, about the competitiveness of the Philippine Economy and the feasibility of the economic agenda presented by the 16th Philippine Presidential administration