A petite, gentle-looking female scientist is leading a research group of more than 30 undergraduates, masters and PhD students at a large institute to simultaneously carry out difficult projects and topics worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"THE FEMALE GENERAL" OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS AND TOPICS
A silver medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in 2000, one of 11 Vietnamese female students to win medals in history, a student of the talent program of Hanoi University of Science and Technology, an excellent student of the University of Tokyo and the National Institute of Informatics, Japan, Associate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Phi Le (42 years old), is currently the director of the Institute for Research and Application of Artificial Intelligence (AI4LIFE) and a lecturer at the School of Information and Communication Technology, Hanoi University of Science and Technology.
Associate Professor Nguyen Phi Le
PHOTO: NVCC
She is the project manager of 3 projects, with an investment of 321,000 USD (about 8.1 billion VND). She also participates as a main member of 2 other projects with a total investment of 295,000 USD (about 7.5 billion VND).
Associate Professor Dr. Nguyen Phi Le said that he and his colleagues are currently implementing a number of artificial intelligence (AI) projects that, if successful and applied, will have a great impact on the lives of Vietnamese people.
A project called "Fi-Mi: Mobile system for monitoring and predicting air quality using artificial intelligence" received nearly 6 billion VND in funding from the VINIF Innovation Fund.
Fi-Mi is a monitoring system based on compact devices placed on buses, using AI to forecast future air quality. "The project will provide real-time air quality maps with high accuracy and wide coverage so that people can access air quality information at any location, not only at the present time but also in the future. Fi-Mi can also help the Government plan timely policies in environmental protection," said Associate Professor, Dr. Le.
Associate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Phi Le (right cover) and the team went on a field trip to the project on AI application in agriculture in Thanh Hoa
PHOTO: NVCC
Another project called "VAIPE: Smart healthcare monitoring and support system using artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things for Vietnamese people" is also funded by the VINIF Innovation Fund with more than 5 billion VND. This AI product will help users collect and manage health-related data and support users in personal healthcare.
Accordingly, the VAIPE application is a software running on smartphone platforms, helping to collect all health-related information from many different sources. This application is equipped with many smart functions such as automatic reminders for taking medication, drug identification and reminders for taking the wrong prescription, warning of disease risks at an early stage...
Explaining the implementation of this project, the female CEO said: "Vietnam is one of the countries with a serious shortage of human resources for health care. Therefore, it is necessary to build smart systems to help people take the initiative in taking care of their health, detecting and preventing diseases at an early stage...".
Both Fi-Mi and VAIPE projects were selected by VinIF as two of the outstanding projects funded by the fund in the past 5 years.
Recently, Associate Professor Dr. Nguyen Phi Le's research group continued to receive funding from the Aus4Innovation Program (funded by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, co-funded and managed by CSIRO) for the project "Sustainable agriculture in Thanh Hoa province applying Artificial Intelligence and Digital Twin technology in proactive carbon farming". This is a collaborative research between the University of Technology and Griffith University, Australia, with the goal of deploying a digital twin and AI platform to manage carbon farming activities in Thanh Hoa province. Through AI technology, farmers will be able to monitor greenhouse gas emissions and optimize farming practices to reduce emissions, creating a platform for profit from carbon credits.
These are just three of the many AI projects that Associate Professor Dr. Nguyen Phi Le and her research institute are working on. Previously, she and her research team had more than 120 publications at many leading conferences in the field of AI and prestigious journals.
Narrowing the TECHNOLOGY GAP with the rest of the world
As a talented engineering student at Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Associate Professor Le initially studied at the Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications. However, becoming a student in the era of the internet boom, computer networks being researched by the world, and then deep learning technology being applied... the petite technology-loving female student Nguyen Phi Le could not help but be attracted by the new flows of technology.
After obtaining her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Japan, Associate Professor Dr. Le returned to Hanoi University of Science and Technology as a lecturer. In 2016, she continued to Japan to do her PhD in IoT (Internet of Things), a field of interest at that time. It was not until the end of her PhD that she began to apply reinforcement learning techniques (a field in AI) to solve problems related to communication networks and began to see how powerful AI is in solving multidisciplinary problems.
Associate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Phi Le during a session of participating in the student graduation defense council
PHOTO: NVCC
"Vietnam is facing an opportunity to shorten and narrow the technology gap with developed countries. AI is the key. Just like the explosion of the internet changed the world before, so did AI." Then, breakthrough achievements in the field of computer vision brought AI back. And by 2021, when ChatGPT was born, AI really exploded when people saw the potential for practical applications of AI in all fields and all classes of society ," Associate Professor, Dr. Le commented.
According to Associate Professor Dr. Le, if Vietnam can catch the "beat" of the AI development wave at this time and have a development policy, it is completely possible to shorten the technology gap with developed countries and dominate technology markets, because the ability of Vietnamese people in the fields of mathematics and information technology is very good, not inferior to the US, Japan, Korea, Australia... "Many Vietnamese people are world-class AI experts, present in many countries. We also have a source of talented young people studying AI at home and abroad. However, in the country, the excellent and promising groups are still relatively few, to develop on a large scale, we need to consider the training problem", Associate Professor Dr. Le shared.
3 factors to develop AI training in Vietnam
Associate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Phi Le is very concerned about developing AI human resources to help Vietnam change and shorten the technology gap with the world.
"To do so, there are three factors that we need to invest in. The first is investing in computing infrastructure with a server system running deep learning models at AI training units. The second is investing in data. To build a large data set for academic research purposes and develop AI technology products that can be applied in practice requires a lot of time, effort, money and human resources to implement. And finally, investing in attracting good human resources to return to contribute and train the next generation," the female AI expert commented.
Thanhnien.vn
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