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Xin chào! I am Khoi, a doctoral student in the Human Language Technology Research Institute, University of Texas at Dallas, supervised by Professor Vincent Ng. I work on vision-language reasoning. Specifically, my research explores meme processing as a structured and controlled environment to push the boundaries of machine’s vision-language perception, reasoning, and generation in real-world contexts. My research has been published in the most pretigious NLP conferences (ACL and EMNLP).

Beside research, I enjoy building practical systems, usually with machine learning. Some of the products I am proud of are:

• a requirement processing pipeline and a knowledge graph-based chatbot at GE Aerospace,
• an interactive map that shows roof area and potential solar energy of buildings in Vietnam at Solano Energy,
• the version control feature of dbdiagram.io, a 200K-MAU tool at Holistics,
• and OneSchedule – a course planning website used by many students at my undergrad university.

My long term goal is to harness AI for Vietnam and for humanity.

In my freetime, I enjoy playing ultimate frisbee, meditating, and blogging.

News

• [May 2025] Paper MemeQA: Holistic Evaluation for Meme Understanding accepted at ACL 2025 (Vienna, Austria)
• [May 2025] I have passed my Qualification Exam at UTD.
• [April 2025] I has been awarded the Louis Beecherl, Jr. Graduate Fellowship at UT Dallas.
• [April 2025] I will be doing an internship at GE Aerospace Research (Niskayuna, NY) in Summer 2025.
• [Sep 2024] Paper Computational Meme Understanding: A Survey accepted at EMNLP 2024 (Miami, Florida, USA)

Fun facts

• I was a competitive programmer at national and regional level (CodeForces profile, press).
• I graduated in the inaugural cohort of a brand new university called Fulbright University Vietnam. That was the best four years of my life.