Kevin González Ortega

Kevin González Ortega

Data Science · Psychometrics · AI Evaluation. Fulbright Scholar at Indiana University Bloomington.

Data Governance and Learning Platform at Fundación Ayudinga

Role: Director of Technology and Educational Research (2019–present); previously Backend Lead (2017–2019) and Junior Software Developer (2016–2017)

Publications: IEEE CONCAPAN XLIII (2025) · Undergraduate thesis on knowledge graphs (2023, in Spanish)

Fundación Ayudinga is a nonprofit digital education organization in Panama that offers free educational content and academic support to students in Panama and Latin America.

Data governance and the Lakehouse

The foundation’s data was spread across many platforms and formats, which made it hard to measure educational impact. We designed and implemented a three-phase data strategy:

  • Diagnosis: a TDWI Data Literacy Maturity Assessment across five dimensions placed the organization at Stage 3, Basic.
  • Architecture: a three-tier Data Lakehouse (data producers → warehouse → data consumers) using Dremio in the cloud, with Kubernetes, Docker and PostgreSQL sources. Data is organized into five semantic layers, from staging to business intelligence.
  • Governance: a structure of domains, sources and attributes; four roles (Head of Data Governance, Data Owner, Data Steward and Data Worker) with their own permissions on each layer; and six policies covering naming, documentation, the glossary, access, quality metrics and onboarding new sources.

Result: data infrastructure, tools and governance each rose two stages, and overall maturity went from Basic (3) to Literate (4). Read the paper →

Knowledge graphs for personalized learning

My undergraduate thesis designed and implemented knowledge graphs to build personalized learning paths on the Ayudinga platform. See the thesis (in Spanish) →

Leadership

  • Direct an R&D portfolio of 10+ projects in machine learning, knowledge management and gamification for education.
  • Lead research on the factors that influence learning, analyzing experimental data to build and evaluate AI models.
  • Designed and maintain the platform’s cloud infrastructure, including cloud services and web servers.
  • Plan web and desktop application projects and lead systems analysis and design.
  • As Director of Finance and Treasurer of the Board, built the finance function and automated financial reporting.