2023 was a busy and exciting year at VISHC. Explore the stories below to learn more about some of the biggest moments and highlights of the year.

1. 15+ New Research Papers Got Accepted in IEEE Transaction Journals, PLOS ONE, Nature Scientific Reports, the International Scientific Journal Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, and more.

In 2023, our VISHC research team has published 15+ new research papers in prestigious AI and Medicine journals, which include IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, PLOS ONE, Scientific Reports (Nature), and the International Scientific Journal Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, and more. Our research spans a diverse array of AI and Medicine topics, encompassing both foundational studies and various facets of intelligent healthcare applications. A full list of publications can be found here.

2. Four More Smart Health Projects Led by VinUni and UIUC Faculty Got Fundings from VISHC Research Funding Program

These projects include:

– “Evaluating the Effect of Antiviral Drugs using Polarized Light Imaging and Machine Learning Approaches” by Stephen Boppart, Marina Marjanovic, Mark Anastasio, Tran Thi Mai, Nguyen Thi Nhung, Wray Buntine, Hieu Pham;

– “Detection and quantitation of cancer ctDNA and miRNA for point of care lung cancer therapy selection” by Brian Cunningham, Xing Wang, Nguyen Xuan Hung, Yi Hyeon Gyu, Tran Thi Mai;

– “Envisioning Urban Environments Resilient to Vector-Borne Diseases: A One Health Approach to Dengue Management” by Praveen Kumar, Helen Nguyen, Jinhui Yan, Lei Zhao, Brian Allan, Andrew Taylor-Robinson, Doan Mai Phuong, Khoa Doan, Le Duy Dung.

– “Smart Indoor Air Quality Control System for Healthier and Greener Buildings” by Vishal Verma, Helen Nguyen, Jinhui Yan, Le Duy Dung, Kok-Seng Wong, Andrew Taylor-Robinson.

3. VISHC Opened the Calls for the Integrated Bachelor’s – Master’s Degree and PhD Programs with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In 2023, VISHC opened the calls for both PhD and Master programs at UIUC. In ten years, we aim to train 50 Ph.D. students, 50 Master students from Vietnam to study and conduct research at both VinUni and Illinois.

4. The First VISHC Summer School 2023 to Excel in Research Activities for VinUni Undergraduates

In this 2023 Academic Summer Break, VISHC organized the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (VISHC-REU) program to support active research participation by VinUni undergraduate students. The research areas include everything funded by VISHC, from Fundamental Machine Learning, Data Science, NLP to Biotechnology, Clinical and Molecular Biology. After nearly 2 months of different invited talks, public forums, lectures, and so on, the outcomes of 20 projects were presented by 30 students. With guidance from VinUni faculty and professors from the US, our undergraduates were able to practice and solve real-world problems through theoretical application while using the latest scientific evidence.

5. Undergraduate Exchange Research Internship at UIUC 2023

Faculty and Research Scientists from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in partnership with the VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center (VISHC) at VinUniversity, have developed a new initiative that brings VinUni undergraduate students to NCSA for a three-month research internship the fields of data security, systems and networking, machine learning and smart healthcare. This year, we focus on multimodal biomedical representation learning for cancer diagnosis, prognosis and treatment selection. Selected students will work closely with Mayo Clinic researchers.

6. The First Vietnamese University to Receive the Prestigious Excellence in Sustainability Award

The VinUni–Illinois Smart Health Center’s (VISHC) initiative to develop and provide low-cost and accessible digital healthcare solutions on a global scale has been awarded the prestigious 2023 Excellence in Sustainability Award by ISCN (International Sustainable Campus Network). ISCN is a global organization that promotes sustainable development among institutions of higher education. This network was founded in 2007 and currently consists of more than 100 prestigious member institutions from around the world, such as Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, etc. The ISCN Excellence Awards are presented annually to recognize the outstanding contributions of universities worldwide to the promotion of sustainability programs, projects, and initiatives with a significant impact on the community. In their fifteenth year, the 2023 Awards continue to showcase the finest models in higher education from around the world.

7. VISHC Named in the Shortlisted for The Power of Partnerships Award at the QS Reimagine Education Awards

The project: “Together build the next generation of digital health workforce” operated by the VISHC has been shortlisted for The Power of Partnerships Award at the QS Reimagine Education Awards. This prize will be awarded to the institution that has leveraged the power of partnership to innovate, scale, or improve its offering and enhance the learners’ experience or outcomes. This project showed the power of partnership between VinUniversity and top universities in the US in Reimagining Education.

8. VISHC Hosted Two International Conferences on AI and Smart Healthcare

VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center (VISHC) and our collaborators successfully organised a special workshop “Signal Processing and Data Science for Smart Health” at the 2023 IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop event and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Science for Smart Health and Medicine at the SOICT 2023.

9. Four Distinguished Invited Talks Have Been Taken Place

In 2023, VISHC welcomed top researchers around the world who visited us and share latest research on AI and Smart Health with our faculty and students.

– Distinguished Invited Talk on “Innovations in Health Analytics and Systems: An Illinois Engineering and Mayo Clinic Partnership” by Prof. Ravishankar K. Iyer and Dr. Phuong Cao from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), USA.

– Distinguished Invited Talk on Using Linked Administrative Health Data for Social by Dr. Nhung Nghiem from Department of Public Health at University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand.

– Distinguished Invited Talk on “The Art of Writing: First Rank Conferences” | Professor Tra My Thai, Research Foundation Professor at University of Florida

– Invited Talk on “Contrimix: A novel & scalable method to improve the generalization of machine models developed for digital pathology” | Dr. Tan H. Nguyen, Staff Imaging Scientist at PathAI

10. VISHC Researcher won the Golden Globe Science and Technology Award 2023

Dr. Hieu Pham, VISHC Researcher and Associate Director of the VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center won the Golden Globe Science and Technology Award 2023. Also in 2023, he was appointed by The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to serve as a member of the Workshop Committee for Engaging Scientists in Shared Responsible Innovation in Neuroscience in Southeast Asia.

11. VISHC Researchers and Research Collaborators Won Two Best Paper Awards

VISHC researchers and our collaborators won two Best Paper Awards at The 23rd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Internet Computing 2023 (CCGRID 2023 – Rank A) and The Eleventh International Symposium on Computing and Networking (CANDAR 2023).

12. VISHC’s Research Project Honoured as Typical Science and Technology Project of VinIF Fund for 5 Years

The VAIPE project, led by VinUniversity and sponsored by the Vingroup Innovation Fund (VinIF), has been selected by the Fund as a prime science and technology project among hundreds of similar projects sponsored by the Fund over the past 5 years. This recognition is significant, as it affirms VinUni’s team and scientific partner network’s ability to effectively operate research projects. Only 5 science and technology projects out of more than 110 projects sponsored by the VinIF Fund in the past 5 years have been selected as typical projects to introduce on the 5th anniversary of the Foundation’s operation. Since its inception, the VAIPE project has achieved many outstanding achievements (10 publications at international top-tier journals and conferences, including 04 Q1 papers, and 02 rank-A papers, 01 Mobile Application, 03 Large-Scale, Open Datasets, 01 Data Sharing Platform, 03 National and International Awards, 08 students got full scholarships for studying PhD in top foreign universities)

Cheers to 2023 — we’re ready for you, 2024.