Hieu Pham, PhD

Biography

Dr. Pham Huy Hieu (Hieu Pham) is currently an Assistant Professor at the College of Engineering and Computer Science (CECS), VinUniversity, and Founding Member and PI at VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center. He is also serving as the Scientific Director of Entrepreneurship Lab at VInUniserity. Dr. Hieu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Toulouse Computer Science Research Institute (IRIT), University of Toulouse, France, in 2019. Previously, he earned the Degree of Engineer from Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST), Vietnam, in 2016. Before joining VinUniversity, Dr. Hieu worked at Vingroup Big Data Institute (VinBigData) as a Research Scientist and Head of the Fundamental Research Team. In Academic Year 2024-2025, he founded and directed The Computer Vision and Medical AI Lab (CVMAIL) at VinUniversity.

His research interests include Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Medical Image Analysis, and their applications in Smart Healthcare. He is the author, and co-author of 50 scientific articles that appeared in about 30 conferences and journals such as IEEE Transaction Journals, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Neurocomputing, Scientific Data (Nature), PLOS ONE, Medical Physics, Frontiers in Digital Health, Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, MICCAI, MIDL, ICIP, and ICCV, ACCV. Since 2020, he has been awarded research funding from many agencies in the Vingroup ecosystem, industrial partners and international partners. In 2021, Dr. Hieu was honored with The DAAD Fellows Award for Outstanding International Early Career Researcher by the German Academic Exchange Service.He is honored to receive the Faculty of the Year Award in 2023.

His research team earned the AI Awards in 2022 for their innovative smart healthcare project called VAIPE. Additionally, he co-authored two papers that received the Best Paper Award. 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. Recently, he received the National Outstanding Young Scientist Award (Golden Globe) in Science and Technology in Vietnam and ’s Biographical Sketch,has been nominated for TOP 20 Outstanding Young Faces of Vietnam 2023. Starting from 2024, he started serving as an Editorial Board Member for Scientific Data Journal (Nature). Hieu’s Biographical Sketch, updated on June 30, 2024.

Research Interests

Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Medical Image Analysis, Bioimaging, Smart Health Applications, Digital Health.

Selected Publications

1. Hieu H. Pham*, Le, T. T., Tran, D. Q., Ngo, D. T., & Nguyen, H. Q. “Interpreting chest X-rays via CNNs that exploit hierarchical disease dependencies and uncertainty labels”. Neurocomputing, 437, 186-194 (2021).

2. Nguyen, Ha Q., Khanh Lam, Linh T. Le, Hieu H. Pham* et al. “VinDr-CXR: An open dataset of chest X-rays with radiologist’s annotations”. Nature Scientific Data 9, No. 1 (2022) 429.

3. Hieu H. Pham*, Ngoc H. Nguyen, Thanh T. Tran, Tuan M. Nguyen, and Ha Q. Nguyen. “PediCXR: An open, large-scale chest radiograph dataset for interpretation of common thoracic diseases in children”. Nature Scientific Data 10, No. 1 (2023): 240.

4. Nguyen, H. T., Nguyen, H. Q., Hieu H. Pham*, Lam, K., Le, L. T., Dao, M., & Vu, V. “VinDr-Mammo: A large-scale benchmark dataset for computer-aided diagnosis in full-field digital mammography”. Nature Scientific Data, 10(1), 277, 2023.

5. Hieu H. Pham*, Louahdi Khoudour, Alain Crouzil, Pablo Zegers, and Sergio A. Velastin. “Exploiting deep residual networks for human action recognition from skeletal data”. Computer Vision and Image Understanding 170 (2018): 51.

6. Nguyen, Thao, Tam M. Vo, Thang V. Nguyen, Hieu H. Pham*, and Ha Q. Nguyen- “Learning to diagnose common thorax diseases on chest radiographs from radiology reports in Vietnamese”, Plos ONE 17, No. 10 (2022): e0276545

7. Quan Nguyen, Hieu H. Pham*, Kok-Seng Wong, Phi Le Nguyen, Truong Thao Nguyen, Minh N. Do. “FedDCT: Federated Learning of Large Convolutional Neural Networks on Resource Constrained Devices using Divide and Co-Training”, The IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management.

8. Tran, T. T., Hieu H. Pham*, Nguyen, T. V., Le, T. T., Nguyen, H. T., & Nguyen, H. Q. “Learning to automatically diagnose multiple diseases in pediatric chest radiographs using deep convolutional neural networks”. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 3314-3323).

9. Nguyen, H. T., Hieu H. Pham*, Nguyen, N. T., Nguyen, H. Q., Huynh, T. Q., Dao, M., & Vu, V. “VinDr-SpineXR: A deep learning framework for spinal lesions detection and classification from radiographs”. In Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention–MICCAI 2021, Strasbourg, France, September 27–October 1, 2021, Proceedings, Part V 24 (pp. 291-301).

10. Nang Hung Nguyen, Duc Long Nguyen, Trong Bang Nguyen, Thanh-Hung Nguyen, Huy Hieu Pham, Truong Thao Nguyen, Phi Le Nguyen. “CADIS: Handling Cluster-skewed Non-IID Data in Federated Learning with Clustered Aggregation and Knowledge DIStilled Regularization”, The 23rd International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid 2023)

Awards and Honors

• Feb. 2024 Top 20 Outstanding Young Faces of Vietnam 2023.
• Dec. 2023 Faculty of the Year Award 2023 (VinUniversity).
• Nov. 2023 Change Maker Award (VinUniversity).
• Sep. 2023 National Outstanding Young Scientist Award (Golden Globe) in Science and Technology 2023.
• May 2023 Best Paper Award 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. 2016 Ph.D. Fellowship for an outstanding candidate from the Cerema Research Center, France.
• Jan. 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.

Professional Education

• Visiting Scholar, ECE, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2023)
• PhD, CS, University of Toulouse, France (2019)
• Degree of Engineer, EE, Hanoi University of Science and Technology (2015)