Hieu Pham

I am currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at VinUniversity, where I work on Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Smart Health Applications. I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the Toulouse Computer Science Research Institute (IRIT) at The University of Toulouse, France, in 2019. In 2023, I became a Visiting Scholar at the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), USA. From 2022, I has been serving as the Associate Director of the VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center (VISHC), that aims to conduct high-impact research on biomedical AI to provide widely accessible health monitoring and improvement for people all over the world.

I spent two years as a Research Scientist at Vingroup Big Data Institute, conducting research on Medical Imaging Analysis. In 2015, I spent half a year at the ICA laboratory for working on a robotized airplane inspection project, called Air-Cobot, lead by AKKA Technologies and AIRBUS group.

Before that, I did my bachelor's at the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST). My graduate internship was done at International Research Institute MICA, Hanoi, Vietnam and AGIM laboratory, Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France.

Ph.D. Thesis  /  CV  /  Google Scholar  /  GitHub  /  LinkedIn

My research interests include Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Computer Vision, especially their applications in Smart Healthcare, e.g. Medical Imaging Diagnosis, AI-based Computer-aided Diagnosis (AI-CAD), AI-assisted Diagnosis and Treatment, AI-assisted Disease Prevention and Risk Monitoring. Check my latest publications here.

I am looking for self-motivated Postdocs, Ph.D. students, Research Assistants and Interns, who are interested in artificial intelligence for smart healthcare, computer vision, machine/deep learning, and natural language processing. If you are interested in doing research with us, please fill out the form. If you are a VinUni student and interested in conducting research, you can reach me via email or meet me in-person at VISHC Office, G Building, VinUni Campus for further discussion. Remote collaboration is also welcome!

●   [Mar. 2025]   I serve as a reviewer for Nature Biomedical Engineering (Journal Impact Factor: ~30.0). Learn more about the journal here.

●   [Mar. 2025]   I became a CIC Asia Faculty Fellow at the Institute for People and Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology. Learn more about CIC.

●   [Mar. 2025]   I am honored to be named as The Outstanding Young Vietnamese Face 2024 in the field of Science and Technology. See more here.

●   [Mar. 2025]   I am honored to be named one of the 10 Outstanding Young Faces of the Hanoi Capital in 2024. See more here.

●   [Jan. 2025]   I will be an invited speaker at MICCAI 2025 held in Daejeon, Republic of Korea in September 2025.

●   [Jan. 2025]   A new paper has been accepted to the ICLR 2025 conference (rank A star).

●   [Jan. 2025]   I received the "Rising Star in Research" award from VinUniversity.

●   [Jan. 2025]   Our international research team from VinUniversity and Cornell University (Ivy League) is offering two (02) PhD positions focusing on human-centered healthcare design for low-cost, smart health applications for common disease screening in low- and middle-income countries. See details here.

●   [Jan. 2025]   Four (04) papers accepted by the 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (rank A). Our team will present these study results in Texas, USA, from April 14–17, 2025!

●   [Dec. 2024]   Our research team (VinUni + EPFL) received funding from the Vietnamese-Swiss Joint Research Programme (NAFOSTED – SNSF) to develop the next generation of explainable vision-language foundation models for medical imaging.

●   [Nov. 2024]   I am honored to be awarded The Royal Academy of Engineering’s Leaders in Innovation Fellowships (LIF Global 2025).

●   [Nov. 2024]   I am honored to be recognized as an Outstanding Faculty Member in Research at the College of Engineering and Computer Science, VinUniversity.

●   [Oct. 2024]   New papers have been accepted at IEEE WACV, IEEE Big Data, Brain Informatics 2024, IEEE BIBM 2024, and Digital Health. Congratulations to all authors. Learn more about our lastest publications here.

●   [Sep. 2024]   My comments on the Vietnamese innovation ecosystem are available in Tạp chí Tia Sáng.

●   [Sep. 2024]   We are hiring a CTO for Align Health. Full job description can be found here.

●   [Sep. 2024]   I have joined as a member of the VinUni Research Affairs Committee.

●   [Aug. 2024]   VinUni-Illinois Pre-PhD Summer School 2024 started.

●   [Aug. 2024]   I founded and directed The Computer Vision and Medical AI Lab (CVMAIL) at VinUniversity.

●   [June 2024]   We are looking for multiple PhD and Postdoc candidates to work on AI-based Precision Pathology at VinUniversity (Vietnam) and UIUC (USA).

●   [June 2024]   I serve as Area Chair for the 17th Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2024!

●   [June 2024]   A new paper has been early accepted for presentation at the 27th Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI2024). Congratulations to Nguyen Van Phi!

●   [June 2024]   Looking for a Postdoctoral Research Associate position (a UIUC full-time appointment) working in Professor Minh Do's group. This is an interdisciplinary research position on AI for Medical Imaging (Medical AI) in collaboration with multiple groups at UIUC and Mayo Clinic. This is on a twelve-month service basis with an annual salary of $70,000. Email to me (hieu.ph@vinuni.edu.vn) if you are interested.

●   [May 2024]   A new paper has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (J-BHI). Congratulations to our undergraduate students Nguyen Viet Duong and Nguyen Xuan Hieu!

●   [Mar. 2024]   We received three (03) external research grants (~143K USD in total) aimed at pioneering innovative smart health solutions and fostering a durable collaboration between VinUniversity (VN) and counterparts at KU Leuven University (Belgium) and Cardiff University (UK). See more here.

●   [Mar. 2024]   I started serving as an Editorial Board Member for Scientific Data Journal (Nature).

●   [Jan. 2024]   I am honored to receive the Faculty of the Year Award (VinUniversity 2023).

●   [Dec. 2023]   We won the Best Paper Award at The Eleventh International Symposium on Computing and Networking (CANDAR 2023).

●   [May 2023]   We open the Call for PhD Applications at VinUni and UIUC.

●   [Oct. 2023]   I have been selected to serve as the Scientific Director of the Entrepreneurship Lab (E-lab) at VinUniversity.

●   [Sep. 2023]   I won the National Outstanding Young Scientist Award (Golden Globe) in Science and Technology, Vietnam.

●   [Sep. 2023]   I received The College's Award for Exceptional Performance in Research AY 2022-2023.

●   [Aug. 2023]   One paper was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (IF 5.3).

●   [Aug. 2023]   One paper was accepted by Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine (IF 3.6).

●   [Aug. 2023]   One paper was accepted by PLOS ONE (IF 3.7).

●   [July 2023]   I 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.

●   [July 2023]   We have been awarded an International Grant from the Cognitive Science Society for the project “Launching Cognitive Science in Vietnam”, led by Professor K. David Harrison, PhD, VinUni's Vice Provost of Academic Affairs.

●   [May 2023]   Our international research team (VinUniversity-VN, L'Université Grenoble Alpes-FR and National Institute of Communications-BR) wins €0.5 million funding from the MIAI Grenoble Alpes Institute (France) to develop "Smart Life Smart Living Intercontinental. AI by and for People".

●   [May 2023]   Our paper titled "CADIS: Handling Cluster-skewed Non-IID Data in Federated Learning with Clustered Aggregation and Knowledge DIStilled Regularization" won the Best Paper Award (ML Track) at The 23rd IEEE/ACM international Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid 2023).

●   [May 2023]   We run our AI in Medicine Seminar.

●   [Mar. 2023]   Two papers got accepted for publication in Nature Scienfic Data (IF 11.211). Check out preprints here and here.

●   [Mar. 2023]   I have joined Coordinated Science Laboratory, UIUC as a Visiting Scholar, working on AI in Medicine with my Advisor, Prof. Minh Do.

●   [Jan. 2023]   Our VinUni-UIUC research team (with Stephen Boppart, Mark A Anastasio, Marina Marjanovic, Mai Tran, Nhung Nguyen, and Wray Buntine) got $260K funding from VISHC Research Funding Program to work on the Evaluation of the Effect of Antiviral Drugs using Polarized Light Imaging. We are looking for 5 PhDs and 1 Postdoc to join us. See more here.

●   [Jan. 2023]   Three papers got accepted (2xQ1 Journals and 1-rank A conference). Congratulations to all authors and co-authors!

●   [Nov. 2022]   In the last three months, 10 research articles got accepted or provisionally accepted for publication at top journals and conferences in AI and Medicine, including PLOS One, Computers in Biology and Medicine, ACCV, and ICPP. A complete list of publications is available here. Congratulations to all authors and co-authors.

●   [Oct. 2022]   Got promoted to Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the College of Engineering & Computer Science, VinUniversity.

●   [Sep. 2022]   We win AI Awards 2022.

●   [Sep. 2022]   Take a short-term visit to the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Bonn, and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), in order to explore new space for collaboration with Prof. Martin Reuter (Head of Image Analysis, DZNE; Assistant Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School) and Prof. Alfred Mertins (Director of the Institute for Signal Processing, University of Lübeck).

●   [Aug. 2022]   I am looking for a PhD student working on AI-based Medical Image Analysis for Early Detection and Diagnosis . This thesis shall be supervised by me, Prof. Qiang Wu, and Prof. Min Xu from University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Selected candidate will be provided full scholarships to conduct her/his research at VinUniversiy and UTS.

●   [Jul. 2022]   I serve as a Program Committee (PC) Member for the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-23) .

●   [Jul. 2022]   Our paper "Deployment and validation of an AI system for detecting abnormal chest radiographs in clinical settings" is accepted by Frontiers in Digital Health.

●   [Jul. 2022]   Our paper "VinDr-CXR: An open dataset of chest X-rays with radiologist’s annotations" is accepted by Scientific Data (Nature, IF 9.051).

●   [Jul. 2022]   VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center (VISHC) is officially launched. With 13,5 million USD in funding from Vingroup, VISHC will focus on interdisciplinary research in biotechnology and data science to develop affordable and accessible projects that can positively impact people’s health.

●   [Feb. 2022]   I serve as a Reviewer for European Conference on Computer Vision 2022 (ECCV2022) and the 25th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI2022)

●   [Dec. 2021]   Our research team got $220K funding from Vingroup Innovation Foundation - VinIF to enhance medication safety.

●   [Nov. 2021]   I gave a talk on Explainablle AI at AI Now: Research and Development 2021 conference, organized by BK.AI (HUST) and Naver Corporation.

●   [Nov. 2021]   I join VinUni as a Teaching Fellow at the College of Engineering and Computer Science and Research Fellow at VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center (VISHC).

●   [Sep. 2021]   I serve as a reviewer for IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2022 (CVPR2022).

●   [Aug. 2021]   We release VinDr-SpineXR: An open dataset for spinal lesions detection and classification from radiographs on PhysioNet. To the best of our knowledge, the VinDr-SpineXR is currently the largest dataset to date that provides radiologist’s bounding-box annotations for developing supervised-learning object detection algorithms. We believe that the dataset will serve as a benchmark dataset for accelerating the development and evaluation of new machine learning models for the spinal X-ray interpretation.

●   [Aug. 2021]   Two papers got accepted by ICCV Workshop 2021 on Computer Vision for Automated Medical Diagnosis.

●   [June 2021]   One paper on "A deep learning framework for spinal lesions detection and classification from radiographs" got accepted by International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2021).

●   [May 2021]   Our new paper titled " VinDr-RibCXR: A Benchmark Dataset for Automatic Segmentation and Labeling of Individual Ribs on Chest X-rays" is accepted by Medical Imaging with Deep Learning (MIDL 2021).

●   [Apr. 2021]   I gave a talk on AI in Medical Imaging at the Summer School on Advances in DS&AI 2021 .

●   [Apr. 2021]   A new paper on AI for chest X-ray analysis is published on Neurocomcomputing.

●   [Feb. 2021]   I serve as a Reviewer for International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV2021).

●   [Sep. 2019]   I just successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis at the Computer Science Research Institute of Toulouse (IRIT), France. The presentation is available here. I will back to Hanoi, Vietnam and work as a Research Scientist in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the Vingroup Big Data Institute (VinBDI) starting from October 2019. My work focuses on applying the latest advances in Machine Learning & Deep Learning for Medical Imaging Analysis.

●   [July 2019]   In our recent study, we showed that a simple deep neural network is able to learn and predict 3D human poses from 2D keypoints obtained from RGB images. The full paper about this research is available on arXiv.

●   [July 2019]   I gave a poster presentation at the annual seminar of Toulouse Computer Science Research Institute (IRIT), France. The presentation was about training a deep learning neural network for predicting 3D human poses from their 2D keypoint detections on RGB images.

●   [July 2018]   My new paper about improving ResNet architecture for human action recognition (HAR) with RGB-D data has been accepted with revision for publication by the IET Computer Vision Journal.

●   [May 2018]   My paper titled: "Exploiting Inception-ResNet networks for human action recognition (HAR) from skeletal data" has been accepted for oral presentation at the 25th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2018).

●   [Jun. 2018 ]   My paper: "Exploiting deep residual networks for human action recognition from skeletal data" has been accepted for publication in the Computer Vision and Image Understanding Journal.

Transforming 3D joint coordinates of the human body carried in skeleton sequences into RGB images for human action recognition in videos with deep neural networks.

This paper presents a supervised multi-label classification framework based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for predicting the presence of 14 common thoracic diseases and observations.

Proposing a new 3D skeleton-based representation, namely, SPMF (Skeleton Pose-Motion Feature) for video-based human action recogntion with depth sensors.

Investigating and applying deep ResNets for human action recognition using skeletal data provided by depth sensors.

A novel automatic vision-based inspection system that is capable of detecting and characterizing defects on an airplane exterior surface.

A system that is able to detect obstacles in indoor environment based on Kinect sensor and 3D-image processing.

●   Instructor, College of Engineering & Computer Science (CECS), VinUniversity.
      Course: "Introduction to Programing - CECS-COMP1010 (Fall 2021-2022)", with Prof. Kok-Seng Wong

●   Instructor, College of Engineering & Computer Science (CECS), VinUniversity.
      Course: "Introduction to Machine Learning - CECS-1020 (Spring 2021-2022)", with Prof. Minh Do

●   Guest Lecturer, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain.
      Course: "An introduction to Deep Learning for Image and Video Interpretation", (Fall 2017-2018).

●   Teaching Assistant, University of Toulouse, France.
      Course: "Introduction to Programming and Algorithms in Python", (Fall 2018-2019).

●   Nguyen Thuy Dung (co-advised with Dr. Le Nguyen), graduate RA. Now ECE PhD student @ Vanderbilt University.

●   Nguyen Anh Duy (co-advised with Dr. Le Nguyen), graduate RA. Now CS PhD student @ UIUC.

●   Tung T. Le (co-supervise with Dr. Ha Q. Nguyen), now CS Ph.D. student @ University of California Irvine.

●   Hieu T. Nguyen (co-supervise with Dr. Ha Q. Nguyen), now CS Ph.D. student @ Northeastern University.

●   Thao Nguyen, incoming CS Ph.D. student @ The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

●   Nguyen Thi Ngoc Huyen, graduate RA. Now ECE PhD student @ UIUC.

●   Tuan M. Nguyen, now CS Ph.D. student @ VinUniversity.

●   Quan M. Nguyen, now Msc. Biomedical Computing at Department of Informatics, TU Munich.

●   Huyen Nguyen, now MSc student @ Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.

●   Sam Sam, now Applied Scientist @ VinBrain.

●   Thanh Tran, now AI Research Engineer @ VinBigData

●   Dung V. Do, now AI Research Engineer @ VinBrain

●   Hoang C. Nguyen (Gold IMO 2017), now undergrad @ KAIST and incoming RA @ VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center.

●   Tung T. Nguyen, now RA @ VinUniversity.

●   Tuan Tran, now RA @ VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center.

●   Khiem Le, now RA @ VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center.

●   [Sep. 2023]   The College's Award for Exceptional Performance in Research AY 2022-2023.

●   [May 2023]   Best Paper Award (Co-author) in the 23rd International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid 2023).

●   [May 2023]   The 2022 ISCN Excellence Awards for our Smart Health Initiative on developing smart solutions to provide widely accessible health monitoring and improvement for people all over the world.

●   [Sep. 2022]   AI Awards 2022.

●   [Sep. 2021]   DAAD Fellowship 2021 for outstanding researcher in AI and Medical Imaging Research, Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany).

●   [Sep. 2019]   Rank 1st in the CheXpert competition, organized by Stanford University.

●   [Sep. 2016]   Ph.D. Fellowship for an outstanding candidate from the Cerema Research Center, France.

●   [Sep. 2015]   Doctoral Travel Scholarship from L’Université Fédérale Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées and Écoles des Docteurs, Toulouse, France.

●   [Sep. 2015]   Research Internship Scholarship from the ICA Research Institute, France.

●   [Jan. 2015]   Graduate Internship Scholarship from the Université Grenoble Alpes, France.

●   Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging

●   Reviewer, IEEE Internet of Things Journal

●   Reviewer, Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML 2023)

●   Reviewer, Signal, Image and Video Processing

●   Reviewer, Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention 2023 (MICCAI 2023).

●   Reviewer, The ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications (TOMM).

●   Reviewer, The International Conference on Information Processing in Computer-Assisted Interventions (IPCAI 2023).

●   Reviewer, IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2023 (CVPR 2023)

●   Visiting Scholar, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), University of Lübeck, Germany, 2022.

●   Visiting Scholar, German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Germany, 2022.

●   Reviewer, IEEE International Conference on Knowledge and Systems Engineering (IEEE KSE 2022).

●   Reviewer, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (JSTSP).

●   Reviewer, European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2022).

●   Reviewer, International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2022).

●   Reviewer, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI).

●   Reviewer, Journal of Electronic Imaging (JEI).

●   Reviewer, IET Computer Vision Journal (IET-CVI).

●   Reviewer, International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2021).

●   Reviewer, IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2022 (CVPR2022).

●   Reviewer, Nature Scientific Reports.

●   Program Commitee, International Conference on Multimedia Analysis and Pattern Recognition (MAPR).