A series of scientific articles by Information Technology students published in international journals

With the lecturers' and students’ efforts in research, recently, 2 groups of students and alumni majoring in Information Technology (IT) from Van Lang University (VLU) have had 2 notable scientific articles approved for publication in the international journals in the Scopus Q2 category.

Aiming to train highly skilled human resources that adapt to the digitalization trend quickly, the Faculty of Information Technology from VLU has facilitated students to access a practical academic environment and participate in professional contests, and domestic and worldwide academic platforms of scientific research.

Since college, Nguyen Thai Anh and Pham Hoang Viet, Information Technology students of Course 24 (majoring in Data Technology), have gotten acquainted with the professional research environment. In their final year, taking suggestions and guidance from Dr. Phung The Bao and MSc. Phan Ho Viet Truong, they decided to conduct a research on Artificial Intelligence.

It took one year with many strict selections for their first scientific article to be officially approved for publication in an international journal. The article “Developing a Restaurant Recommended System via the Vietnamese Food Image Classification” by Thai Anh and Hoang Viet was published in Vol. 14, pages 1711-1719 in the International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE).

It is said that Thai Anh and Hoang Viet applied the ResNet-34 model, a variant of the convolutional neural network, to classify Vietnamese food images, then applied alternating least squares technique in matrix factorization and Apache Spark in distributed computing to train the restaurant location dataset, resulting lists of most appropriate restaurants that offering many options to users.

Following Thai Anh and Hoang Viet, alumnus Pham Ba Vuong (Course 25) and undergraduate Nguyen Chi Hong Phuc (Course 27) were also guided by MSc. Phung The Bao and MSc. Phan Ho Viet Truong to write a scientific article “TourMapQA: Using Deep Learning to Develop a Vietnam Map based Tourism Question Answering System”. This project employed the deep learning application to build a system that suggests and offers the most optimal routes based on the map to users, helping tourists to plan travel routes in Vietnam easily. Their project passed an over 6-month review and was accepted for publication in IAES International Journal of Artificial Intelligence (IJ-AI), one of the prestigious global journals in the Scopus Q2 category.

Currently, each of them is striving for their job and academic journey. Hong Phuc is now a senior majoring in Artificial Intelligence, Ba Vuong and Hoang Viet are recruited right after graduation and thriving in their chosen expertise. Thai Anh in particular is in the final months of completing the Master of Data Science and AI program at the Asian Institute of Technology (Thailand). He said that soon he would return to Vietnam to fulfill his dream of becoming a university lecturer, to help and give support to the juniors like what he used to get from his lecturers when he was at VLU.

News: Hoai Anh
Photos: provided by mentioned figures