Many Leading Scientists and Researchers Came to VinUniversity to Discuss Sustainable Development Using Data Science

Recently, VinUniversity’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, together with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, organized a workshop on Environmental Intelligence. This was a forum to discuss the latest ideas, research, and interdisciplinary practices in the application of data science and artificial intelligence to sustainable environmental development in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

There were many practical topics discussed surrounding this theme, such as climate change and plastic waste pollution in the Mekong Delta, AI-based solutions for disaster responses, sustainable energy development in Vietnam, the effects of floods on clean water quality, the use of satellite images in climate tracking, and so on.

With the goal of building a research center on Environmental Intelligence at VinUniversity, Prof. Laurent El Ghaoui, Dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science, shared about the university’s approach for this workshop: “Besides publishing articles or research papers, the important thing that VinUniversity aims to develop are the practical solutions that can make a positive impact on the environment and society.”

Prof. Laurent also introduced the 3 proposed focuses of research at the Center for Environmental Intelligence: “view from the sky” data, including satellite images and daily traffic; “voice of the people” data empowered by natural language processing, collected through content analysis of newspapers, social networks, surveys and mobile applications; and models and optimization methods to help users make the most accurate judgments.

The Workshop saw the participation of many leading scientists and scholars, such as Prof. Praveen Kumar, Executive Director of the Prairie Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; Prof. Khalid Mosalam, Director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at the University of California Berkeley; Prof. Thanh H. (Helen) Nguyen, Distinguished Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Engineering, Grainger School of Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; Dr. Kim Thi Thuy Ngoc, Institute of Strategy and Policy on Natural Resources and Environment; Dr. Nguyen Linh Dan, Hanoi University of Science and Technology; together with other representatives of universities and research institutes around the world.