INT2 CEO Dr. Nguyen Viet Cuong spoke at the ICT 2020 Forum “Digital Transformation: Opportunities and Challenges”, organised by the Vietnam Informatics Association on July 3, 2020, sharing insights on data processing and infrastructure challenges in Vietnam’s digital transformation.
During the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020, Dr. Nguyen Viet Cuong and InfoRe – a company he co-founded – were mobilised to join the Rapid Information Response Team under the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control. The team applied data-processing methods and tools developed through years of practical work, including experience from Vietnamese language and speech processing projects.
Their work included contact tracing and probabilistic modelling of F0, F1, F2 cases, building risk prediction models for provinces and nationwide, and developing real-time information dashboards. Tasks involved standardising input data, extracting information from health declarations, and integrating multilingual data from multiple sources.
Drawing from this experience, Dr. Cuong presented a 5-step framework for information processing in digital transformation: collection and standardisation, classification and linking, storage and processing, analysis, and visualisation.
He raised several issues: inconsistencies in national databases due to lack of unified standards; absence of semantic classification in most systems; inadequate distributed computing infrastructure for national-scale tasks; insufficient practical skills among graduates; and the prevalence of “blackbox” AI models that perform well statistically but fall short of expert-level accuracy.
Dr. Cuong recommended that authorities standardise and open up national databases, localise information classification tools for community use, invest in distributed computing infrastructure, strengthen university-industry collaboration, and develop AI deployment standards following the examples of Japan and the United States.