Interesting Research on User-data System at VinUniversity
Interesting Research on User-data System at VinUniversity
  • Reporter Yang Seo-Yeon, Kim Jin Seong
  • 승인 2023.03.01 21:10
  • 댓글 0
이 기사를 공유합니다

▲Prof. Le Duy Dung (Faculty of Computer Science Program)
▲Prof. Le Duy Dung (Faculty of Computer Science Program)

 Are there any innovative or unique programs that you would like to introduce to us?
 I can share with you the philosophy of VinUniversity. The unique motto is “follow very high international standards, especially from the top universities in the world.” 
 The first program is the Ph.D. in Computer Science. We focus on three domains. The first domain is smart healthcare which helps to give smart medical services to many people. The second domain is new materials development. The third one is on environmental intelligence.
 The second program is undergraduate research. We train undergraduate students to work in research projects, even in freshmen year. Students can start by doing a literature survey or review and collecting data to support professors. Gradually, they can acquire useful critical thinking and question answering skills.

 Was there any reason why you decided to become a professor?
 I enjoy teaching and coaching young people. Also, you learn more by teaching. Through teaching, you get new perspectives from your students. So, you always have new ideas and perspectives from different generations.
 When talking and teaching different generations of students, you can learn more about what they think about the direction society is headed in. That is what makes my life more meaningful, and thus I can have some impact on my students’ lives and careers. 

 What are the most attractive fields in your research? 
 I guess the attractiveness of the computer science field, especially in machine learning is you have a lot of data generated by the consumers on the machines from everywhere. You have a lot of raw resources to engage in knowledge mining. It is like extracting gold from the raw material.
 You also have great computing infrastructure in place. Now, we have much more computing power compared with 10 or 20 years ago. Thus, you have the power of the computer, availability of the data, and all the frameworks that you need to work and pursue these kinds of directions. You have qualified personnel who can implement new ideas to transform businesses and societies.

 Why did you start focusing on recommender systems and algorithms for analyzing user-generated data?
 The necessity of personalized recommendation is driven by the explosion of available options online, which makes it difficult, if not downright impossible, for each user to investigate every option. Product and service providers rely on recommendation algorithms to identify manageable number of the most likely or preferred options to be presented to each user. Customers could find the information they need conveniently thanks to recommender systems. It also changes the way businesses communicate with users and strengthens the interactivity between them. 
 If you work on this domain, you can also explore the techniques in other relevant domains. For example, a researcher working on mining insights from the user-generated data can implement a lot of techniques from natural language processing, computer vision, and reinforcement learning domains to achieve the ultimate goal of making a customer happier.

 Any advice for students who decide to become a researcher?
 If you want to become a researcher, you have a lot of choices to make. What should be the criteria to help you make decisions? It could be driven by aspirations of your own. Or, you may want to solve a problem that a community is facing. My point is that it should be driven by a problem or a challenge faced by societies.
 It is always the question of what kind of research you want to work on and helping to solve what problems in which communities. In general, the research problem should be interesting to you so that you could engage and pursue it for a long time.