Principal Investigators & Key Members: Laurent El Ghaoui

Material Science is nowadays concerned with the discovery of new materials that can address important societal-scale problems. Today, the discovery process is mostly done via a laborious trial and error fashion. Digital material science (DGM for short) is an emerging field that aims at shortening the path from idea to discovery, using AI technology. Prof. Yaghi and his collaborators have discovered a set of new ground-breaking materials, referred to as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which have the potential to greatly help in combating climate change and sustainability issues, via carbon capture for example. In the recent months, a group of us at CECS have started collaborating with him on a digital material science approach to the AI-powered discovery of MOFs, where AI tools are used to identify experimental conditions under which MOFs can be successfully made.

Principal Investigators & Key Members: David Harrison

Vietnam (population 100 million) is both a “Biodiversity Hotspot” and a “Language Hotspot”, with over 110 distinct ethno-linguistic groups. Vietnam is also on the frontlines of climate change. Our project, based at VinUniversity, partners with Indigenous ethnic minorities—such as the Bahnar people of Kon Tum Province—to explore their Environmental Intelligence and how they are adapting to climate change. Indigenous people around the world, and in Vietnam, have been applying their intimate knowledge of their local environment to respond to climate change with strategies for both adaptation and mitigation. They have much to teach us, if we are willing to partner, respect their knowledge, and learn from them.

Principal Investigators & Key Members: Kyunghwa Chung

This project helps to solve the air pollution problem and improve the well-being of residents by applying the latest GIS and NLP technology. This project utilizes knowledge from various academic fields for a comprehensive understanding of the air pollution problem and develops creative solutions by applying diverse research perspectives. Therefore, this project adopts an interdisciplinary research approach and jointly involves multiple researchers from CECS, CBM, and CHS, as well as external partners. This project is a preliminary project focusing on air pollution and serves as a cornerstone for the Environmental Intelligence Center.

Principal Investigators & Key Members: Nidal Kamel

The focus of this research is to develop apps that provide useful environmental information to various decision-makers, including local, indigenous stakeholders concerning the following two themes:

Theme 1 (spaceborne). Continuous assessment of the changes in carbon stock and forests biomasses over the various forest regions in Vietnam using deep learning model and satellite data. Though the efficiency of satellite data in covering wide areas, its relatively low spatial resolution and its high cost are of great concern. In Theme 2 we develop an alternative system to Theme 1 but using drones equipped with LiDAR and video cameras.

Theme 2 (airborne). Continuous monitoring of biodiversity and biomass using drone’s Lidar and video processing data combined with AI system. The effectiveness of the spaceborne and airborne systems in biomass and biodiversity assessment will be compared in term of accuracy and cost of implementation.