“I work at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP). I’m photographed here in our ‘open space’, a communal work area overlooking Nihonbashi, Tokyo’s financial district.
My background is in mathematics. I’m attracted to its precision and rigour as well as its applications. Here at the AIP centre, the research focus is on artificial intelligence (AI). My own passion is the development of the theoretical foundation of machine learning.
I grew up in the rural north of Vietnam. The country was extremely poor after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, so my parents had to make many sacrifices to raise my three siblings and me. Mathematics has been my passport to world travel. My journey began when I received a scholarship to study in Australia, after which I attended universities in the United States, Austria and Germany. I then worked at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa for 7.5 years before I took the RIKEN job in June 2018. The research staff here are very international. Colleagues hail from China, Germany, France, Austria, Poland and other countries.
Our team is divided into three groups. I lead a group working on the fundamental research of AI. The other two groups focus on its applications, and on AI’s legal and social aspects. Recently, I’ve been investigating information geometry: data that have rich geometrical structures. In the field of computer vision, which enables machines to understand digital images, we regularly deal with data lying in high-dimensional spaces, beyond conventional 3D modelling and shape analysis.
A main motivation of my work is its use in brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). Creating links between the brain and computers might one day help people who are paralysed to regain freedom of movement. The aim of BCIs here is to decode brain signals to control the movements of body parts, perhaps with robotic help, just by using thoughts.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
