My Curriculum Vitae

Education

• Ph.D in Computing and Information Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology, 2026 (expected). GPA: 3.78
• B.S. in Computer Science, Gettysburg College, 2022. GPA: 3.93

Work experience

• August 2022 - Present: Graduate Research Assistant. Computer Graphics and Applied Perception Lab. Rochester, NY, USA.
  • Leading an event-based eye tracking project and developing new machine learning algorithms for event data
  • Led an eye tracking project (eye segmentation and sim2real) funded by Meta that resulted in a manuscript
  • Presented reports to co-PIs and Meta’s main investigator
• August 2022 - Present: Graduate Research Assistant. Neural Adaptive Computing Lab. Rochester, NY, USA.
  • Leading a reinforcement learning project that applies active inference to robotics
  • Collaborating with another robotics laboratory and working on improving deep reinforcement learning system
• April 2021 - August 2021: Software Engineer Intern. Forestry Information System JSC. Hanoi, Vietnam.
  • Created and deployed an iOS wildfire detection app using React Native and Swift
  • Created and presented comprehensive documentation, requirements, and deliverables for mobile app projects
  • Engineered deep learning wildfire detection models for deployment on embedded forest cameras

Publications

A Deterministic Neural Network Approach to Playing Gin Rummy

Nguyen, V. D., Doan, D., & Neller, T. W. (2021). A Deterministic Neural Network Approach to Playing Gin Rummy. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 35(17), 15622-15629. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v35i17.17840

Predicting Perceived Music Emotions with Respect to Instrument Combinations

Nguyen, V. D., Nguyen, Q. H., & Freedman, R. G. (2023). Predicting Perceived Music Emotions with Respect to Instrument Combinations. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 37(13), 16078-16086. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i13.26910

Services and leaderships

• Currently serving as a publicity chair at PerCom 2024, IEEE.
• NSF’s AWARE-AI NRT Trainee 2022 and 2023

Projects

• Facebook/Meta Funded Event-based Eye Tracking Project: Detected pupil and iris ellipse using event stream from the DVS sensor to perform gaze tracking.
• Facebook/Meta Funded Deep Domain Adaptation Project: Minimized the domain shift across different eye segmentation datasets. Yielded positive results and finished manuscripts.
• Reinforcement Learning through Active Inference: Built agent to solve reinforcement learning robotics tasks using generative model of the world and active inference.