Ase Morales

Research software engineer bridging complexity, computability, and cognition. Previously engineered fintech & voice AI systems for startups.

  • complex systems
  • computational neuroscience
  • emergent algorithms
  • spiking neural networks
  • computational complexity
  • embodied intelligence
  • network science
  • optimization

Papers

MobileLookNet: A Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network for Detection of Osseous Metastasis Using Feature Fusion and Attention Strategies

I. D. Morales, C. J. Echon, A. R. Teaño, R. Alampay, and P. A. Abu

2024 2nd Asia Conference on Computer Vision, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition (CVIPPR '24)

[Paper] [Code]

An Experience Sampling Study of Student Emotional Life: Preliminary Results

M. M. T. Rodrigo, L. P. Alampay, Q. N. Lee-Chua, and I. D. Morales

2024 32nd International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE '24)

[Paper]

Selected Awards

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Program Awardee of Computer Science

of Ateneo de Manila University, 2024 (Opens in a new tab)

Awarded to the top graduating student in Computer Science for academic excellence, leadership, and service.

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Grand Prize Winner

of Google Code-in, 2018 (Opens in a new tab)

Selected from 3,124 contestants across 77 countries for open-source engineering excellence. 1st Filipino Grand Prize winner in history.

Philosophy

The frontier of artificial intelligence lies in our fundamental understanding of biological intelligence.

“Many lines of research have become goals of pursuit in their own right, with little recall of the reasons for pursuing those lines. A little grounding occasionally can go a long way towards helping keep things on track.” — Rodney Brooks, Intelligence without Reason, 1991

Dominant industry AI research revolves around the algorithmic level of intelligence (scaling and optimizing ML model architectures for incremental benchmark performance) and the mechanistic level of intelligence (mechanistic interpretability). While progress at these levels has driven mutual contributions between AI and cognitive science, the bottleneck of scientific progress lies at the pace layer of computation, which asks fundamental questions about cognition from first principles. Of these questions, I am primarily interested in asking: how does intelligence arise from the interaction of simple biological, physical, and social components within spatio-temporal constraints?

Contact Information

I limit correspondence during research cycles to prioritize deep work. Please allow a few days for a response. Thank you for your patience.