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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. 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 such as ACL and EMNLP. My long term goal is to harness AI for Vietnam and for humanity.

Beside research, I enjoy building real-world 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.

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

News

• [August 2025] Paper MemeInterpret: Towards an All-in-One Dataset for Meme Understanding published at EMNLP Findings 2025 (Suzhou, China)
• [May 2025] Paper MemeQA: Holistic Evaluation for Meme Understanding accepted at ACL 2025 (Vienna, Austria)
• [May 2025] I passed my Qualification Exam at UTD, proceeding to PhD candidacy.
• [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.

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.