Winning First Prize at Euréka 2021

On December 18, 2021, our project won First Prize in Information Technology at the 23rd Euréka Student Scientific Research Award, a national student research competition in Vietnam, along with a Certificate of Merit from the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The work

I built this project with Tien-Phat Nguyen at the University of Science, VNU-HCM, advised by Prof. Minh-Triet Tran, in collaboration with Prof. Tam Nguyen at the University of Dayton. The task: given a sentence describing a vehicle, such as its color, its type, and how it moves, find the matching vehicle in a collection of traffic videos. Our system matches the text query against both the vehicle’s appearance and its motion.

One project, three milestones

This was my first research project. At the start, I was just a student trying to make a model work, with no idea where it would lead. Then, within 8 months:

• April 2021: accepted as my first paper, Traffic Video Event Retrieval via Text Query using Vehicle Appearance and Motion Attributes, at the 5th AI City Challenge Workshop at CVPR 2021.

• November 2021: received a Certificate of Merit from the Rector of the University of Science as an Outstanding Thesis.

• December 2021: won First Prize at Euréka.

I still remember how unreal it felt to hear our names called. More than any prize, this project gave me something I didn’t have before: the belief that I could do research, and the wish to keep going.