Richard Ramirez Ayuyang

I'm a Professor II at Cagayan State University – Gonzaga Campus. I have a PhD in Educational Management, an MS in Information Technology, and I'm partway through a doctorate in IT. I've also served as dean and as the university's MIS director, which is where much of the systems work started.

The pattern in my work is consistent: a paper process becomes a problem, and I replace it with something self-hosted — Moodle for online classes, a document archive so campus paperwork stops being physical paperwork, Koha for the library, Nextcloud instead of paid cloud storage. Everything runs on Linux and Docker on hardware we control, so the university isn't renting its infrastructure from someone else.

The Municipality of Gonzaga is next door to the campus, and some of the university work translated directly: the same document-management approach, the same self-hosted setup.

On the research side, I publish on the systems I build and the questions around them: e-learning platforms, data privacy and cybersecurity awareness among university employees, and more recently on-premise NLP and large-language-model tools for document management in local government. The systems work and the research feed each other — much of what I've published started as something running on a server here.