Understanding and Reasoning with AI (URA)

Understanding and Reasoning with AI (URA) is a research group at the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), VNU-HCM. The group was founded in 2009 by Prof. Quan Thanh Tho. After several name changes during its development, URA was officially established under its current name in 2021, reflecting its long-term vision and research direction. Guided by a focus on advanced reasoning in Artificial Intelligence, URA places strong emphasis on explainable AI, logical reasoning, and multi-step problem solving. This orientation allows the group to position itself as one of the leading AI research communities in Vietnam.

URA gathers lecturers, researchers, postgraduate, and undergraduate students whose research spans both theoretical and applied AI. On the theoretical side, members actively study and disseminate the latest advances in AI to foster academic exchange and collaboration across Vietnam. On the applied side, URA has developed and deployed AI-powered products in domains such as education, healthcare, legal services, and finance, alongside key technical areas like Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision, Speech Processing, and Time Series data. In addition to these foundations, URA is pioneering new research directions, including Vietnamese Large Language Models (LLMs), Agentic AI, Reasoning with LLMs, Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR). These emerging areas are central to the group’s mission of advancing AI research that is both globally relevant and locally impactful.

URA also collaborates extensively with enterprises and partners at both national and international levels. These collaborations involve joint research projects, technology transfer, and the deployment of real-world AI solutions that contribute to innovation, digital transformation, and sustainable development in Vietnam and beyond.