The “handshake” between Professor Van H. Vu, VinBigData Scientific Director, who created ViVi voice assistant for future VinFast cars, and Vingroup will be “the best start of action for “Made in Vietnam, Made by Vietnamese” products in the future”.
Returning to Vietnam and becoming the Scientific Director, VinBigData (under Vingroup), Professor Van H. Vu has embarked on research projects on the Vietnamese genomes, AI solution for medical imaging, level 4 electric autopilot in Nha Trang and most recently the appearance of the voice assistant Vivi on VinFast cars is not inferior to Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant.
According to information on the website of VinBigData, Professor Van H. Vu decided to join Vingroup in 2018 and is a pioneer in building advanced solutions based on data science and artificial intelligence in Vietnam as VinBigData Scientific Director. He is also a professor of mathematics at Yale University (USA).
Professor Van H. Vu once said: “Many people often ask, “Why study Maths?” I often look at everyday things in the eyes of statistics. Mathematics is not something sublime but in fact is necessary for everyone.”
In 1994, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Eötvös Loránd University. Four years later, he received his doctorate in mathematics from Yale University, USA under Professor László Lovász, who was awarded the Polya Prize in 1979.
After doing postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) Princeton and at the Microsoft Research Department, from 2001 to 2005, he worked at the University of California at San Diego.
Since the fall of 2005, he has been a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. Since 2011, he has been a Yale University Professor. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Paris 6 in 2006.
Although he is very busy, Professor Van H. Vu often returns to his home country to give lectures and interact with students and the mathematical community in Vietnam”.
Prof. Van H. Vu is the world’s leading expert in mathematics with many prestigious awards, one of the pioneers in opening the “golden age” for Vietnamese mathematics together with Prof. Chau B. Ngo. His research areas include combinatorial mathematics, probability, and additive number theory.
Regarding scientific achievements, in 2002, Prof. Van H. Vu won the Sloan Fellowship and NSF Career Award for young scientists in the US. In 2008, he won the Polya Prize (SIAM) of the Society of Industrial Mathematics (SIAM) for his research on measure concentration. To date, the number of mathematicians awarded the Polya Prize is quite small, and they are all leading mathematicians.
Just four years later, he received the American Mathematical Society’s Fulkerson Prize (together with J. Kahn and A. Johansson) for his solution to the Shamir problem in graph theory. In the same year, Professor became an honorary member of the American Mathematical Society.
In 2009, the Vietnamese State recognized him as a part-time professor at the Vietnam Institute of Mathematics at the age of 39. In 2020, he was elected an Honorary Member of the World Association of Mathematical Statistics. He has more than 100 works in international journals.
The professor said that data technology will be a weapon to help Vietnam “take a shortcut” and apply it to the health care, agriculture, and transportation sectors. virtual assistant Vivi is some of the clearest examples. Photo: Facebook Professor Van H. Vu
Before coming to Vingroup, Professor Van H. Vu regularly gave lectures in Vietnam, shared and became an inspiration for young mathematicians and domestic math students. He is also a person who has many concerns with the development of science – technology and education in the country: “There are problems that if not Vietnamese people do it, who will?”
In a conversation with the press in 2016, Professor Van H. Vu confided: “The field of mathematics (probability and discrete math) that I pursue is very applied. Currently its role in development is very strong. Industrial development in the US is very large, especially in information technology. Hopefully someday that knowledge will also be useful in Vietnam.”
Perhaps, the moment he’s been waiting for has come, when Vietnam takes a strong step into the industrial revolution 4.0 and Vingroup is determined to create technology for Vietnamese people.
Professor Van H. Vu’s return to Vietnam to establish VinBigData was considered by Vingroup’s Deputy General Director Vo Quang Hue as “the best start of action for the upcoming Made in Vietnam, Made by Vietnamese products”. .
Professor Van H. Vu once told the press that making a few products that immediately change the economy is unthinkable, because the domestic science and technology foundation is still weak. But with the construction of big data, by taking advantage of the world’s advanced technology into practical applications in daily life, we can completely “take a shortcut”.