Pham Huy Hieu, PhD
College of Engineering and Computer Science
Principal Investigator, VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center
Assistant Professor, Computer Science program
Research Administration
Associate Director
Biography
Dr. Pham Huy Hieu is currently an Assistant Professor at the College of Engineering and Computer Science (CECS), VinUniversity. He also serves as a Principal Investigator at the VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center and is the Scientific Director of the Entrepreneurship Lab at VinUniversity. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Toulouse Computer Science Research Institute (IRIT), University of Toulouse, France, in 2019, after completing his Engineering degree at Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST), Vietnam, in 2016.
Dr. Hieu is the Founder and Head of the Computer Vision and Medical AI Lab (CVMAIL) at VinUniversity. His research focuses on AI, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Medical Image Analysis, and their applications in Smart Healthcare. He has published 75 peer-reviewed papers in leading international journals and conferencessuch as Nature Scientific Data, Computer Vision and Understanding Image, Neurocomputing, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, PLOS ONE, MICCAI, MIDL, CVPR, ICCV, ICLR, ICASSP, with over >2,000 citations on Google Scholar. He is also a co-author of two Best Paper Awards. He also holds 04 exclusive patents and 01 registered software solution. In collaboration with international partners, he has successfully secured millions of USD in research funding from various national agencies and global industry partners to develop digital healthcare solutions for the community.
Since 2024, Dr. Hieu has served as a member of the Editorial Board of Scientific Data (Nature) and has been a Reviewer for several prestigious journals, including Nature Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI), and Communications Medicine (Nature).
Among his recognitions, Dr. Hieu received the DAAD Fellowship in 2021 for outstanding early-career researchers and was awarded the Global Leaders in Innovation Fellowship 2025 by the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2022, his team received an AI Award for their pioneering smart healthcare project, VAIPE. He was named Faculty of the Year in 2023 and received the Rising Star in Research Award in 2024. Most recently, he was honored with the prestigious National Outstanding Young Scientist Award in Science and Technology and was nominated for the 10 Outstanding Young Faces of the Hanoi Capital in 2024 and the Outstanding Young Faces of Vietnam 2024 in Science & Technology.
In his role as Deputy Director of the Research Management Office (RMO), Dr. Pham Huy Hieu will support the RMO’s Director in overseeing research and innovation activities, including assisting in the establishment of new RISE Centers, managing research funding and promoting external grants, fostering partnerships with industry and international collaborators, as well as contributing to the development of research strategies and policies.
• Computer Vision
• Machine Learning
• Medical Image Analysis, and their applications in Smart Healthcare
Journals
1. Hieu H. Pham*, Le, T. T., Tran, D. Q., Ngo, D. T., & Nguyen, H. Q. “Interpreting chest X-rays via CNNs that exploit hierarchical disease dependencies and uncertainty labels”. Neurocomputing, 437, 186-194 (2021).
2. Nguyen, Ha Q., Khanh Lam, Linh T. Le, Hieu H. Pham* et al. “VinDr-CXR: An open dataset of chest X-rays with radiologist’s annotations”. Nature Scientific Data 9, No. 1 (2022) 429.
3. Hieu H. Pham*, Ngoc H. Nguyen, Thanh T. Tran, Tuan M. Nguyen, and Ha Q. Nguyen. “PediCXR: An open, large-scale chest radiograph dataset for interpretation of common thoracic diseases in children”. Nature Scientific Data 10, No. 1 (2023): 240.
4. Nguyen, H. T., Nguyen, H. Q., Hieu H. Pham*, Lam, K., Le, L. T., Dao, M., & Vu, V. “VinDr-Mammo: A large-scale benchmark dataset for computer-aided diagnosis in full-field digital mammography”. Nature Scientific Data, 10(1), 277, 2023
5. Hieu H. Pham*, Louahdi Khoudour, Alain Crouzil, Pablo Zegers, and Sergio A. Velastin. “Exploiting deep residual networks for human action recognition from skeletal data”. Computer Vision and Image Understanding 170 (2018): 51-
6. Nguyen, Thao, Tam M. Vo, Thang V. Nguyen, Hieu H. Pham*, and Ha Q. Nguyen- “Learning to diagnose common thorax diseases on chest radiographs from radiology reports in Vietnamese”, Plos ONE 17, No. 10 (2022): e0276545
7. Quan Nguyen, Hieu H. Pham*, Kok-Seng Wong, Phi Le Nguyen, Truong Thao Nguyen, Minh N. Do. “FedDCT: Federated Learning of Large Convolutional Neural Networks on Resource Constrained Devices using Divide and Co-Training”, The IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management.
Conferences
1. Tran, T. T., Hieu H. Pham*, Nguyen, T. V., Le, T. T., Nguyen, H. T., & Nguyen, H. Q. “Learning to automatically diagnose multiple diseases in pediatric chest radiographs using deep convolutional neural networks”. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 3314-3323).
2. [C-2] Nguyen, H. T., Hieu H. Pham*, Nguyen, N. T., Nguyen, H. Q., Huynh, T. Q., Dao, M., & Vu, V. “VinDr-SpineXR: A deep learning framework for spinal lesions detection and classification from radiographs”. In Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention–MICCAI 2021, Strasbourg, France, September 27–October 1, 2021, Proceedings, Part V 24 (pp. 291-301).
3. [C-3] Nang Hung Nguyen, Duc Long Nguyen, Trong Bang Nguyen, Thanh-Hung Nguyen, Huy Hieu Pham, Truong Thao Nguyen, Phi Le Nguyen. “CADIS: Handling Cluster-skewed Non-IID Data in Federated Learning with Clustered Aggregation and Knowledge DIStilled Regularization”, The 23rd International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid 2023)
2019: Ph.D. in Computer Science, the Toulouse Computer Science Research Institute (IRIT), University of Toulouse, France.
2016: Degree of Engineer in Industrial Informatics, Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST), Vietnam.
May 2023: Best Paper Award in the 23rd International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid 2023).
May 2023: The 2022 ISCN Excellence Awards for our Smart Health Initiative on developing smart solutions to provide widely accessible health monitoring and improvement for people all over the world.
Sep. 2022: AI Awards 2022
Sep. 2021: DAAD Fellowship 2021 for outstanding researcher in AI and Medical Imaging Research, Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany)
