Two Vietnamese students win prize for artificial intelligence development in Japan

Professor Masaki Nakagawa (left) with two students Ly Tuan Nam (middle) and Nguyen Cong Kha at the campus of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Koganei - Photo: MAINICHI

According to Japan's Mainichi newspaper, 23 teams from universities and technical colleges across Japan participated in the competition held in December 2017, organized by the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communications Engineers of Japan.

This year's challenge is to create the most effective AI system to read ancient hiragana, one of the two character sets of the Japanese language.

The AI ​​product of two Vietnamese students Ly Tuan Nam and Nguyen Cong Kha, both 28 years old and studying at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, was able to read up to 96% of single characters, and 88% of three-character combinations.

Both students are being supervised by Professor Masaki Nakagawa at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Koganei, a western suburb of Tokyo.

According to Japan's Mainichi newspaper, the two Vietnamese students spent about four months developing their AI system, which includes a three-layer neural net that simulates human brain functions.

The system then learned 300,000 ancient hiragana characters through images from 14 ancient handwritten manuscripts, including A Passionate Life by Edo-period author Ihara Saikaku.

The two Vietnamese students are both studying at the Hanoi University of Science and Technology. Student Nguyen Cong Kha said he also participated in using AI to decipher writings on wooden tablets found at the Heijo Castle ruins in Japan’s Nara Prefecture.

Nguyen Cong Kha also revealed that he has a personal goal of building an AI system to read Nom script, a hieroglyphic writing system developed by the Vietnamese people since the 10th century. The reason is that not many people can read Nom scripts anymore, so many ancient texts have not been fully interpreted. "I want to do it to be useful for us Vietnamese people," Cong Kha shared with the Japanese newspaper.

The research of the two Vietnamese students "will certainly be useful in historical research," said supervisor Professor Nakagawa.