Young professor with a desire to bring advanced AI technology to Vietnam

After many years of studying and working abroad, Professor Hy Truong Son (30 years old) wants to use the accumulated knowledge to guide Vietnamese students in researching artificial intelligence (AI); at the same time, he also has the aspiration to bring advanced AI technologies to Vietnam.

Conquer difficult programming competitions in foreign countries

Growing up in Phu Gia village, Tay Ho, Hanoi, Mr. Son studied mathematics and information technology at the High School for the Gifted in Natural Sciences (University of Natural Sciences - Vietnam National University, Hanoi). In grade 12, he won second prize in the competition for excellent students.   national computer science

Mr. Son received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2022.

NVCC

The days of studying hard and solving extremely difficult problems in the national excellent student team ignited Son's passion for creativity and computer science research later. Before going to Hungary, he briefly studied at the University of Technology - Vietnam National University, Hanoi and won the silver cup, the super cup of the Vietnam Student Informatics Olympiad. In 2013, Son was granted a full scholarship by the Ministry of Education and Training to study at the University of Budapest, also known as Eotvos Lorand University, under the Vietnam - Hungary agreement. "The first difficulty when studying and living in Hungary was the language. Hungarians do not speak much English, so to make daily life easier, I learned their language. Hungarian cuisine is very different from Vietnam's, so I tried to adapt and cook Vietnamese food myself based on the available ingredients here," Son said.

Professor Hy Truong Son

NVCC

In 2014, Mr. Son was fortunate to be guided by Professor Andras Lorincz at Eotvos Lorand University in doing scientific research. In 2015, his research with Professor Andras Lorincz on a new semi-supervised learning algorithm in computer vision to find features on human faces won the first prize in the Hungarian national student scientific research competition. In the same year 2015, he continued to win the first prize in the Hungarian national ACM - ICPC programming competition. This is a prestigious programming competition for university students, each team of 3 people participates in solving difficult problems in 5 hours with a computer. In 2016, Mr. Son graduated as valedictorian in the computer science major at Eotvos Lorand University. After that, he received a letter of recommendation from Professor Andras Lorincz to continue studying at a higher level. With a letter of recommendation from a prestigious professor and many outstanding achievements, Professor Risi Kondor (a Hungarian mathematician) accepted him as a PhD student at the University of Chicago (USA). At the University of Chicago, Mr. Son continued to receive a full scholarship for his doctoral degree. In 2022, he successfully defended his doctoral thesis in computer science.

Quit Google to pursue his dream

In 2016, Mr. Son applied for Google's summer internship program and was accepted after 3 rounds of technical interviews. In the summer of 2017, he worked at Google (Chicago City) on a project applying machine learning to system security. With good results, he was invited by Google to return for an internship in the summers of 2018 and 2019 in California (USA). Here, he worked for Google Cloud on machine learning applications, detecting errors on cloud computing systems.

Mr. Hy Truong Son took a photo with Professor Deborah J. Curtis, President of Indiana State University (USA).

NVCC

After graduating with his PhD, Mr. Son had a hard time deciding whether to work officially at Google or continue his academic research career. "At Google, I learned how to think and design programs and systems to operate for millions, even billions of users on the giant scale of the corporation. Google has an extremely high salary, but if I pursue academia, I will have more time and freedom to contribute to Vietnam through education. In the end, I chose the academic path," Mr. Son said. After quitting his job at Google, Mr. Son became a lecturer and continued to receive a postdoctoral scholarship at the University of California (San Diego, USA). Here, he taught the subject of mathematical foundations for data science. "Standing in the hall, imparting knowledge to 200 students, I felt happy. And the decision to pursue an academic path was the right one," Mr. Son said. Since August 2023, Mr. Son has held the title of Assistant Professor (in the US, there are 3 levels of Professor: Assistant, Associate, Full) at Indiana State University. Here, he teaches and conducts scientific research in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. In addition to teaching, he also conducts research on artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve basic scientific problems in physics, chemistry and biology. He has published many publications at prestigious conferences and journals around the world. Although he has been away from his homeland for many years, Mr. Son still has the desire and aspiration to contribute to the country. Currently, he is participating in a program to guide excellent Vietnamese students to do scientific research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (VIASM) and FPT Corporation. Mr. Son has had students who have published scientific articles in major journals and conferences around the world. Among them is Ngo Nhat Khang, who has just graduated from the Computer Science major at the University of Natural Sciences in Ho Chi Minh City and is currently a research assistant at the Residency program of FPT Software AI Center (a program to train young talents in the field of AI). Khang said: "Under the guidance of Mr. Son, my main research direction is to focus on using AI to solve scientific problems. Thanks to that, I have completed a scientific article published in Chemical Physics, a Q1 journal in the field of computational chemistry. During the work process, Mr. Son always enthusiastically helped me from coming up with ideas to completing the article". Besides education, Mr. Son is also cooperating with FPT Software to bring AI technologies to Vietnam. Typically in the fields of natural language processing for Vietnamese and the application of computer vision in manufacturing industries. He hopes that AI will promote Vietnam's software and manufacturing industry further in the future.

Professor Arash Rafiey, working at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Indiana State University, commented: "Professor Hy Truong Son is very friendly, energetic and loves to discuss many different issues, especially related to AI. He is an expert in machine learning and data science who has published many high-quality works at top conferences. I invited him to apply for the position of Professor at Indiana State University and Son agreed."

Thanhnien.vn

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