About

Experience, education, academic service and awards.

I'm a Vietnamese Computer Science researcher working at the intersection of computer vision, multimodal learning, and trustworthy AI. I graduated with honors with a Master's degree in Computer Science from Aalto University, and a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology (Honor Program) from Ho Chi Minh University of Science, VNU-HCM.

My research focuses on how multimodal large language models perceive and reason about structure — position reasoning and grounding in medical imaging (PRS-Med), spatial reasoning over volumetric scans (SpatialMed), efficient vision-language architectures (Firebolt-VL), and self-supervised representations for 3D radiology (Rad-JEPA 3D). In parallel I study in-context attribution: how faithfully we can trace a language model's output back to its context when that context overlaps with knowledge already stored in its weights.

On the industry side, I was a Lead Machine Learning Engineer at SpexAI GmbH (acquired by Nynomic AG), where I led the development and delivery of an AI analysis system for plants. Before that, as a Data Scientist at VNG Corporation, I built a FaceID system and led its Face Security feature, and developed license plate detection & recognition and multi-object tracking for surveillance cameras.

My research is supervised by Prof. Minh-Triet Tran, Prof. Ulas Bagci, Prof. Sebastian Szyller, Prof. Bo Zhao, Dr. Debesh Jha, and Msc. Hai-Dang Nguyen. Outside of research, I enjoy reading, soccer, music, and films.

Experience

Industry

SpexAI

Lead Machine Learning Engineer — Spex A.I GmbH (Mar 2024 – May 2026)

Led the development and delivery of an AI analysis system for plants.

SpexAI

Machine Learning Engineer — Spex A.I GmbH (Oct 2021 – Mar 2024)

SongGen

Senior Research Scientist — SongGen (Mar 2024 – May 2025)

Music and accompaniment generation; open-sourced the LLambada project.

VNG

Data Scientist — VNG Corporation (2022 – 2024)

Built a FaceID system and led its Face Security feature; license plate detection & recognition and multi-object tracking for surveillance cameras.

Aeyes

Founder — Aeyes – Smart Glasses for Blind (2020 – Present)

Software Developer — Microbox (2021 – 2022)

BaoData (2020)

Academic

Research Intern — Xu Lab, Carnegie Mellon University (Jun 2025 – Present)

Investigating the spatial reasoning of 3D multimodal LLMs over volumetric medical data (SpatialMed).

Research Assistant — TAC Lab, Aalto University (Present)

Exploring in-context attribution and how it interacts with the knowledge stored in a model's in-weight data.

Research Assistant — Bagci Lab, Northwestern University (Aug 2024 – Present)

Studying knowledge distillation for efficient medical image segmentation (SAM-EG), and the grounding and position-reasoning capabilities of multimodal LLMs (PRS-Med).

Research Intern — Empathic Computing Lab (2022 – 2023)

Performed multimodal analysis of EEG signals to study human cognition.

Research Intern — AIOZ (2021 – 2022)

Education

Aalto

Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

M.Sc. (with Honors)  ·  Major: Computer Science Minor: Machine Learning, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence GPA: 3.7 / 4  ·  Top 1% Thesis: In-Context Attribution for Large Language Model
Supervisors Prof. Sebastian Szyller
Prof. Bo Zhao
HCMUS

Ho Chi Minh University of Science, VNU-HCM, Vietnam

B.Sc. (Honor Program)  ·  Major: Information Technology GPA: 3.58 / 4.0  ·  Top 5% Thesis: Pose Knowledge Guidance for Person Re-Identification
Supervisors Prof. Minh-Triet Tran
Msc. Hai-Dang Nguyen
LHP

Le Hong Phong High School for the Gifted

Research Interests

Deep Generative Model Computer Vision NLP Audio Generation Medical Image Analysis Trustworthy AI Multimodal LLMs Spatial Reasoning Knowledge Distillation Context Attribution

Academic Service

Conference Reviewer

NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, WACV, MICCAI, ACM MM, ICME, MMM, IJCNN

Journal Reviewer

Pattern Recognition, TMI, TCSVT

Honors & Awards

Paper Awards & Scholarships

2025Best Paper Award — CVPR Workshop 2025 (NeIn)
2024Best Paper Award — AI-SIPM @ ICMR 2024
2024Scholarship awarded by ICME 2024
2022Excellent Paper Award — ICMV 2022
2022Best Paper Award — RIVF 2022

Competitions & National Prizes

2023Third Prize — Vietnamese National Invention 2023
2022Second Prize — Vietnamese Invention for Society
2022First Prize — Innocity
2022Top 1 — Zoo Hackathon
2021Second Prize — Makethon (no first prize awarded)
2021Second Prize — Software for Student (no first prize awarded)
2021Second Prize — Vietnamese Edtech Startup 2021
2021Top 2 Best Project — TensorFlow Community
2021Top 2 Medical Track — MediaEval 2021
2021Top 3 — KO Hackathon
2020Top 3 Medical Track — MediaEval 2020
2020Third Prize — Vietnam National Talent Youth in Computer Science
2019Third Prize — Vietnam National Science and Engineering Fair
2018Bronze Medal — Robotacon