Our seminar series on Innovation in AI in Asia continues with guest speaker, Thang Luong, Co-founder of VietAI and a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Thang will highlight his VietAI project that aims to build up the human resources necessary for Vietnam to flourish in the AI era.

Shixiang Shane Gu, Senior Staff Research Scientist from Google DeepMind, will serve as host and moderator.

About our speakers:

​Thang Luong obtained his PhD from Stanford University in which he built state-of-the-art neural machine translation systems at both Google and Stanford. Seeing the love and passion of Vietnamese students for AI, machine learning, and deep learning, he founded VietAI to bring back knowledge to Vietnam.

Shixiang Shane Gu is a Senior Staff Research Scientist in Google DeepMind, where he leads a team in Gemini Thinking and Post-Training. Previously, he led Multilinguality team in Gemini Post-Training, was a senior researcher in the ChatGPT team at OpenAI, an ex–Research Scientist at Google Research, Brain Team and a Visiting Associate Professor (Adjunct Professor) at the University of Tokyo. Shane holds PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, supervised by Richard E. Turner, Zoubin Ghahramani, and Bernhard Schölkopf. Shane holds B.ASc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto, supervised by the thesis advisor Geoffrey E. Hinton. Shane previously was also a visiting scholar at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University hosted by Emma Brunskill. Shane’s academic work received Best Paper Award at CoRL 2019, Google Focused Research Award, Cambridge-Tübingen PhD Fellowship, and NSERC Scholarship, and was featured in Google Research Blogpost and MIT Technology Review. Shane is a Japan-born Chinese Canadian, and he speaks, reads, and writes in three languages.

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Our seminar series on "Topics in International Technology Management: Innovations in AI from Asia" continues weekly until December 2, 2025. Seminars are open to the public and held most Tuesdays, 4:30 PM – 5:50 PM