At the VietAI Summit 2019, Dr. Hung Bui, Director of VinAI Research, discussed the development of AI in Vietnam. VinAI Research is the first AI research lab in Vietnam to focus on fundamental AI research. In his presentation, Dr. Bui shared how VinAI can conduct high-impact research that pushes the boundary of frontier technology to accelerate the application of AI in Vietnam.
AI Around the Globe and the Risk of Being Left Behind
Above is a chart from NeurIPS, the #1 AI conference in the world. As you can see, the rate of AI research keeps increasing. But Vietnam doesn’t have a lot of AI research, which puts it at risk of being left behind. For this reason, VinAI Research was established six months ago. Funded by VIN Group, its mission is to conduct top-tier, high-impact research that pushes the knowledge frontier in AI and accelerates AI applications in Vietnam, the Asia Pacific region, and beyond.
In order to utilize a core research group, VinAI Research is building an AI Residency program to train the next generation of AI talent in Vietnam. They are attracting the people who have completed a graduate degree or are in the last few years of their undergraduate degree. These students are very smart but haven't had much exposure to frontier technology development. At least not yet.
VinAI Research Areas
The lab focuses on numerous areas such as machine learning, computer vision, NLP (natural language processing) and multi-modality sensors. Below are research topics that VinAI published about this year:
- Image captioning with personality: a challenge in human-computer interaction is how to create a machine that can see and describe a view in an engaging way mimicking human personality.
- A dataset for activities in Vietnam's street: this can help extract and track human activities from Vietnam street images.
- Trash detection on Hanoi streets: train a faster R-CNN model to detect bounding boxes of trash.
- Background subtraction: technology that automatically separates background and foreground regions.
- Biometrics and Face Recognition: distinguish in a photo, the real face of a person or a video replay of a person. This project is very useful for authentication and to avoid fraudulent image manipulation.
- Image segmentation for medical images: adding global context information to improve medical images.
To watch a video of Dr. Bui's full presentation, click here.
To access all of Dr. Bui’s slides for this presentation, head over to Kambria’s Resource Library. The Resource Library can be accessed for free by community members who own KAT tokens. Simply register for the Kambria platform by clicking “Login/Register” on the top right-hand side of the screen. Then choose “Library” to access materials from the Summit.
About VietAI Summit 2019
More than 450 people attended VietAI Summit 2019, “AI for The Future,” organized by VietAI and Kambria. With a program featuring many reputable guest speakers from big tech companies such as Google Brain, Toyota Research Institute, Kambria, NVIDIA, VinAI Research, Vinbrain, Deakin University, and Vietnam National University HCMC, we received many fresh insights into the exciting state of AI research and application, not just in Vietnam, but also around the world. To receive an invitation to VietAI Summit 2020, Like the VietAI Facebook page and Like the Kambria Facebook page.
To read more tech articles from VietAI Summit 2019, click here.
