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. Starting in November 2026, I will pursue a Ph.D. at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), supervised by Prof. Eckehard Steinbach, with a research focus on computer vision and foundation models.
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. Eckehard Steinbach, Prof. Minh-Triet Tran, Prof. Ulas Bagci, Prof. Min Xu, 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
Founder — Open-Robust Lab (OpenRB)
My independent research lab builds AI systems that enhance human creativity while maintaining robustness, safety, and responsible deployment.
Lead Machine Learning Engineer — Spex A.I GmbH (Mar 2024 – May 2026)
Led the development and delivery of an AI analysis system for plants.
Machine Learning Engineer — Spex A.I GmbH (Oct 2021 – Mar 2024)
Senior Research Scientist — SongGen (Mar 2024 – May 2025)
Music and accompaniment generation; open-sourced the LLambada project.
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.
Founder — Aeyes – Smart Glasses for Blind (2020 – Present)
Software Developer — Microbox (2021 – 2022)
BaoData (2020)
Academic
Research Assistant — Xu Lab, Carnegie Mellon University (Present)
Investigating the spatial reasoning of 3D multimodal LLMs over volumetric medical data (SpatialMed).
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 Assistant — TAC Lab, Aalto University (Dec 2025 – Aug 2026)
Exploring in-context attribution and how it interacts with the knowledge stored in a model's in-weight data.
Research Intern — Empathic Computing Lab, University of Auckland (2022 – 2023)
Performed multimodal analysis of EEG signals to study human cognition.
Research Intern — AIOZ (2021 – 2022)
Education
Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany
Aalto University, Espoo, Finland
Ho Chi Minh University of Science, VNU-HCM, Vietnam
Le Hong Phong High School for the Gifted
Research Interests
Academic Service
Program Committee
Conference Reviewer
Journal Reviewer
Honors & Awards
Paper Awards & Scholarships
Competitions & National Prizes