Reflections on the Plenary Session of RISE ICREATE 2026
(Series 2 of 4)
By Genevieve B. Kupang, Binalonan, Pangasinan
This is the 2nd in a series of four. Here is the link to the first series of RISE ICREATE 2026:
Binalonan, Pangasinan. If the first plenary speaker, Dr. Panos Panagiotakopoulos and Dr. Kent Peel, Seneca Polytechnic, Canada, asked us to reckon with who we are as users of artificial intelligence, the second speaker invited us to ask something equally urgent: how exactly does AI fit into the work that defines us as researchers? Where, in that painstaking process from question to publication, does it help, and where does it mislead?
Dr. A.K. Mahbubul Hye, Chair, Department of Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Faculty of Management, Shinawatra University, Thailand, took the floor with clarity of purpose. Where Panagiotakopoulos and Peel, had given us an understanding of AI as a system, Dr. Hye gave us a researcher’s map.
He was speaking from the inside.
Hye introduced himself through his academic journey. His introduction earned that credibility before his first argument was made. A doctoral graduate of the Department of Decision Science at the School of Quantitative Sciences, Universiti Utara Malaysia, holder of two master’s degrees and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the American International University-Bangladesh, Hye’s research life spans supply chain management, blockchain technology, operations research, and decision science.
He brings to the question of AI in research the perspective of someone who has navigated the full research lifecycle, from hypothesis to data collection to peer-reviewed publication, across multiple disciplines and international institutions.
Hye represents Shinawatra University, which he introduced with pride: the most international private university in Thailand, with 74% of its more than 5,000 students coming from 23 nationalities, rated QS 5 Stars and ranked 250th in QS Asia 2026. It is a university where internationalization is a lived reality.
Research, innovation, and celebration. Dr. A.K. Mahbubul Hye joins the ribbon cutting for the Research Exhibits at RISE ICREATE 2026 before delivering his plenary address. A fitting beginning to a day of ideas.
What Is Research?
Hye began with research itself. He grounded the conversation by restating something foundational that often goes unstated in AI discussions: what research actually is.
Research, he reminded the room, is a systematic process of inquiry aimed at discovering new knowledge, verifying facts, or solving problems through careful observation, analysis, and interpretation. Its objectives are fourfold: 1) discover knowledge, 2) find solutions, 3) test theories, and 4) understand phenomena. He walked the participants through the full research process, from identifying the problem and reviewing the literature to formulating hypotheses, designing the methodology, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting results, drawing conclusions, and finally reporting findings.
It was an anchoring. Hye’s point was this: AI does not replace this process. It enters it at specific stages. Understanding where AI enters and where AI cannot is the difference between using AI as a research tool and using it as an intellectual shortcut that weakens the work.
Use AI as a Researcher
Hye enumerated ten reasons why a researcher today might turn to AI, and each one illuminated a real and persistent pain point in academic work: 1) automatic sorting of literature, 2) automatic information extraction, 3) reduction of search time, 4) identification of trends and themes, 5) personalized recommendations, 6) improvement of collaboration, 7) data correction and normalization, 8) plagiarism detection, 9) semantic analysis, and 10) automated scientific monitoring.
Reading that list aloud, I watched the room recognize itself. These are solutions to the concrete frustrations that researchers, particularly those working in institutions in the Global South, often without research assistants, large library budgets, or institutional database subscriptions, face every single day. The appeal of AI to the Filipino researcher is not laziness. It is a necessity dressed in the language of efficiency.
Hye understood this without needing to say it explicitly. And that understanding gave his toolkit recommendations their moral seriousness.
A Toolkit for Every Stage of the Research Lifecycle
What made Hye’s presentation distinctive is that he mapped the tools to the research process itself, stage by stage, with a specificity that was actionable.
For topic identification and question formulation, he presented AnswerThis for spotting unaddressed gaps in existing literature, Elicit for pulling information from academic databases such as Semantic Scholar, Consensus for answering empirical yes-or-no questions using peer-reviewed literature, Research Rabbit for visualizing connections between studies, and Perplexity for broad brainstorming and background context.
For literature review and framework formulation, the mapping became even more fine-grained. Elicit for extracting claims and variables from research papers. Consensus for measuring scientific consensus percentages. Whimsical and Litmaps for visual mapping of citation webs. NotebookLM for hallucination-free synthesis from uploaded files. Perspective AI and Koji for scaling qualitative user interviews. Dovetail and Marvin for clustering insights across transcripts.
For data analysis, he drew a firm line between qualitative and quantitative needs. NVivo, Thematic, and Atlas.ti for qualitative and mixed-methods work. These tools identify themes, patterns, and visualizations to support interpretive research. SPSS, Tableau, Power BI, Excel, Minitab, and SmartPLS for quantitative analysis, with SmartPLS specifically noted as the industry standard for Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling.
For writing, he named Paperpal, Trinka.ai, Jenny.ai, Grammarly, QuillBot, SciSpace, Overleaf, and Google Docs. These tools assist with everything from grammar checking to LaTeX-based collaborative academic writing.
For research presentation, he recommended Gamma, Canva, Beautiful.ai, and Mind the Graph for creating scientific diagrams and visual materials.
It was a practitioner-tested toolkit. And the message running beneath it was as important as the tools themselves: the researcher who knows which tool to use at each stage is a different kind of researcher from one who simply opens ChatGPT and asks it to write a literature review.
The Warning Embedded in the Generosity
Hye’s presentation was generous, and his summary contained what I consider the important intellectual contribution of the session: a clear-eyed reckoning with what AI cannot do and what it risks doing to research integrity.
Artificial intelligence, he noted, is transforming the research lifecycle by accelerating data analysis, literature synthesis, and administrative workflows. But these same tools raise concerns regarding algorithmic bias, academic integrity, and what he identified as one of the most insidious risks of the current moment: the potential for polished AI prose to mask weaker underlying science.
That phrase stopped me, “Polished AI prose masking weaker underlying science.” I have sat on enough dissertation/thesis panels and conference evaluation committees to know that this is not a hypothetical risk. It is already happening. We are reading papers that sound authoritative, that cite correctly, that flow with the grammar of confidence, and yet, when we probe the methodology or interrogate the theoretical grounding, something is missing. Something essentially human: the struggle, uncertainty, and genuine encounter with a question that resisted easy answers.
Hye stated it with the calm of someone who has seen it in the data and in the classrooms.
What This Means for Philippine Higher Education
Sitting in that Cabin Hall at WCC ATC, surrounded by researchers from eleven institutions across three regions of the Philippines, I found myself thinking about what Hye’s framework means for us specifically. Philippine higher education is at an inflection point. The pressure to publish in Web of Science, Scopus-indexed journals is real. The CHED Internationalization Report itself, which every higher education institution must submit, now tracks the number of published research in Scopus-indexed, Web of Science, ACI, alongside collaborative research with international partners. The metrics are clear. The resources, for most institutions outside the flagship state universities, are not.
In that gap between expectation and resource, AI tools enter with enormous appeal. And Hye’s presentation offered something valuable precisely because it honored that reality. He gave researchers a map for using these tools intelligently and ethically, at the right stage, for the right purpose, with the right level of human oversight.
The researcher who uses Elicit to identify gaps in the literature is doing something different from the researcher who uses AI to write the literature review. The researcher who uses NotebookLM to synthesize their own uploaded documents is doing something different from the researcher who feeds a prompt to a general-purpose model and accepts what comes back as a scholarly contribution.
These distinctions matter. They are the difference between AI as a research instrument and AI as a research replacement.
Dr. Rosalie Sheryll T. Rosales, Scientific and Innovation Conference Chair; Dr. Roger A. Martinez, Jr., Conference Chair; and Dr. Dick O. Eugenio, AI Research Forum Chair, presented a plaque of appreciation and a token of gratitude to plenary speaker Dr. A.K. Mahbubul Hye, Chair of the Department of Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Faculty of Management, Shinawatra University, Thailand, in recognition of his address on artificial intelligence in research at the RISE ICREATE 2026 International Conference, WCC Aeronautical and Technological College, Pangasinan, Philippines, May 25–26, 2026.
Dr. Mahbubul Hye A.K., joined by Dr. Rosalie Sheryll T. Rosales, Scientific and Innovation Conference Chair, and Dr. Roger A. Martinez, Jr., Conference Chair, awards Certificates of Recognition to the winners of the Best Capstone Projects during RISE ICREATE 2026.
Synthesis Worth Carrying Forward
As I sat with the full arc of both plenary sessions of RISE ICREATE 2026, what struck me most was the complementarity between the speakers. Panagiotakopoulos and Peel gave us the architecture of the human-AI system, with its four factors and the moral weight of the diner who must taste before serving. Hye gave us the practitioner’s workbench: the specific tools matched the specific stages of the research process, with the researcher’s judgment as the indispensable constant throughout.
Together, Panagiotakopoulos, Peel, and Hye argued, from different disciplines, different nationalities, and different institutional contexts, for the same essential conviction: that AI in research is only as good as the researcher directing it, the judgment they apply, and the integrity they refuse to compromise.
That is a lesson worth sharing. And worth building institutional policy around.
Dr. A.K. Mahbubul Hye, with fellow speakers, Dr. Charis Christelle J. Go, President of Berkeley School–Baguio, Dr. Cherrie Melanie Ancheta-Diego, CESO III (Director IV), Region 1, Engr. Leonora F. Quarte – CHED Region, from Left to Right: Dr. Ambrosio P. Detran, Dr. A.K. Mahbubul Hye, Prof. Nicanor Germono Jr., Dr. Roger Martinez Jr., Dr. Cynthia P. Lopez, Dr. Genevieve B. Kupang, Dr. Cherrie Melanie Ancheta-Diego, Dr. Charis Christelle J. Go, Engr. Leonora F. Quarte, Dr. Diosdado C. Caronongan, Dr. Sonny Soriano, Prof. Arvin Louise Biasbas, and Dr. Dick Eugenio.
BCU’s College of Hospitality and Tourism Management (CHTM) takes the stage at RISE ICREATE 2026 as Dr. Mahbubul Hye A.K. and Dr. Rosalie Sheryll T. Rosales, Scientific and Innovation Conference Chair, and Dr. Roger A. Martinez, Jr., Conference Chair, present the Best Paper and Best Presenter Awards to student researchers Erlea Mica D. Madarang, Rica K. Basalong, Jamaykah Bernal, Kaycee T. Comising, and Romelyn Dionisio for their paper, “Effectiveness of TutorIn as an AI-Assisted Tool in Enhancing Professionality Among Hospitality Management Students.
Photo Credits: WCC Aeronautical and Technological College; special thanks to Ms. Dannah Valerie Dulnuan for her gracious coordination.
##########
About the Author:
Genevieve B. Kupang, PhD, is Dean of the Graduate School and International Relations Officer of Baguio Central University, Baguio City, Philippines. WURI Historian | WUNI-L Secretary | CAIRO, Member, Board of Directors. Peace Education Coordinator, WCCI.
Published in reflection of the plenary session of RISE ICREATE 2026, held at WCC ATC, Pangasinan, Philippines. Series 2 of 4.
