Zalo AI Challenge's advisory board brings together leading experts

After 6 times of organization, Zalo AI Challenge has always received attention and contributions from the professional community. The competition's consultants will closely follow the entire competition process and play an important role in professional orientation as well as consulting for the competing teams, contributing to discovering talented factors of the Vietnamese AI industry.

The advisory board of this year's competition includes: Dr. Chau Thanh Duc - Head of Zalo AI Lab Research Department, Lecturer at University of Natural Sciences; Dr. Nguyen Truong Son - Scientific Director at Zalo AI; Mr. Nguyen Minh Triet - Head of Data Science Team at Zalo AI; Mr. Nguyen Minh Tu, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Zalo.

In addition to Zalo AI's senior staff, this year's competition also received the support of big names in the industry such as: Prof. Nguyen Le Minh, currently Director of the Interpretable AI Research Center at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST); Assoc. Prof. Tran Thanh Long, Deputy Dean, Research Director, Faculty of Computer Science, Warwick University; Dr. Ngo Duc Thanh - Head of the Faculty of Computer Science, Ho Chi Minh City University of Information Technology.

Desire to inspire young talent

Prof. Nguyen Le Minh - Director of the Interpretable AI Research Center at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) - although living and working in Japan, still accepted to be an advisor for the competition. The professor said that he was convinced by the practical values that the competition brings to the community.

“Zalo AI Challenge is a useful competition that encourages young talents to practice AI solutions and bring AI closer to life. The data and methods from the competition have scientific value and are also very valuable in terms of application,” shared Prof. Minh.

Always concerned about building a community of young people who master technology to create quality Generative AI for Vietnamese people, with more than 20 years of research and teaching in the field of technology and AI, Professor Nguyen Le Minh hopes that his participation in the advisory board will contribute to the competition to build a community and inspire future generations.

Prof. Minh passionately shared: “We need to promote the development of the AI community. In the future, if we focus on mobilizing large resources in terms of both resources and human resources to create a large common language model for Vietnamese people to help the community of scientists and engineers explore applications for AI (similar to how Meta shared Llama-2), we can encourage the stronger development of quality Generative AI applications for Vietnamese people”.

According to Professor Minh, a competition like Zalo AI Challenge will contribute to promoting the development of the community. The data from the competition can become a useful resource, contributing to the research and development of the community of AI researchers and engineers in the future.

Appreciate the practical application

The most “quintessence” of this year’s Zalo AI Challenge is said to be the topic. To agree on the topic, the advisory board spent 5 months working hard. When talking about the journey of creating the topic, Dr. Chau Thanh Duc - Head of Zalo AI Lab Research Department said that the advisory board spent a lot of effort to “weigh and measure” and select the 3 most suitable topics from more than 30 proposals, to ensure that it meets the competition’s criteria of promoting practical application.

According to Dr. Chau Thanh Duc, each topic in this year's Zalo AI Challenge has practical applications such as being able to generate ringtones, advertising drawings for a product description, or teaching a model to be able to reason and calculate.

Dr. Duc said: “Each problem in the exam is a common problem in real life. If further investment is made, the solutions from the competition can be built into larger solutions for many similar problems and applications in today's life.”

Join hands to connect and develop the AI community

Belonging to the generation that “pioneered” the AI field in Vietnam, experts on the advisory board all believe that the biggest difficulty for young people pursuing AI technology is the rapid development of this field. To keep up and not be eliminated, in addition to basic knowledge, young people need to equip themselves with the ability to think logically and grasp problems. Therefore, competitions like Zalo AI Challenge are considered a “golden” opportunity for teams to gain practical experience and receive training from a generation of experienced AI researchers and developers.

In addition, with a playground like Zalo AI Challenge, the value of the competition lies not only in the prize or the success of each individual, but also in the connection with the community.

Dr. Chau Thanh Duc sent a message to young people: “Connecting and learning from the community through Zalo AI Challenge is also extremely important. The path to AI development in Vietnam is a long and challenging journey. Only with connection and sharing within the community can we go far on that journey.”

Tan Tai

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