From September 8–12, 2025, I had the privilege to attend the 4th SoICT Summer School on “Agentic AI”, hosted at the School of Information and Communication Technology (SoICT), Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST).
This year’s summer school featured lectures from professors and experts representing Naver, Viettel, NVIDIA, VinUni, VIASM, SoICT-HUST, HCMUT VNU-HCM, and UET VNU-HN. The topics spanned from multimodal learning, LLMs, and RAG, to agent systems, automation workflows, and reinforcement learning. The sessions ranged from foundational to deeply advanced, offering both academic orientation and industrial perspectives for students and young researchers.
I (Nguyễn Song Thiên Long) and Võ Thị Như Quỳnh, both research assistants of Prof. Quản Thành Thơ, were fortunate to be among the 50 selected participants out of more than 200 applications – an acceptance rate of 40%, almost like the Findings track of an A* conference.
During these five days, I not only learned new knowledge and met new friends, but also built memories that I will never forget:
- I had the honor of demonstrating in Prof. Thơ’s talk, showcasing our agentic chatbot for university admissions. This is the same project we are now submitting to AACL, one of the top NLP conferences, so presenting it here was like a “pre-release” to gather peer feedback.
- Due to an unusual arrangement by the organizers, I ended up sharing accommodation with Mr. Đức, a lecturer at SoICT-HUST and member of the organizing committee. Thanks to him, I borrowed his motorbike for the entire week. That bike gave me a taste of Hanoi: I rode across the city, explored hidden streets, and tried countless dishes—one night I even had three meals in a row!
- I was lucky enough to receive a special prize from ViettelAI, awarded by their Director of Enterprise Consulting, for being one of the few participants to complete the full quiz on AI Agents correctly.
- I made meaningful academic connections, including with Dr. Linh from SoICT-HUST, who is working on memory managers. I even invited him to give an offline talk for our research group in Ho Chi Minh City.
- The proudest moment came when I won second prize in the project competition. Together with my teammates, we built an agentic system that extracts related work and identifies research gaps from user-provided keywords. Working with Mr. Tùng from Samsung showed me what efficient, industry-style collaboration looks like, even within just three days.
- On the last morning, I woke up before dawn to attend the flag-raising ceremony at Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum at 6 a.m. Standing there, watching the national flag rise, was deeply moving – a moment of gratitude and pride that perfectly closed my first summer school.
SoICT Summer School 2025 gave me knowledge, friendships, achievements, and inspiration. I am grateful to Prof. Thơ for recommending me, and to Prof. Bình and Dr. Sang for organizing such a meaningful event.
This was my very first summer school – and it truly felt like a turning point. In the past, I had been one of the head organizers of summer schools for high school students at my university. But this time, I stood on the other side – not as the organizer, but as the participant. Experiencing the lectures, the projects, the friendships, and the pride of achievement myself was both humbling and empowering, marking a new chapter in my journey as a young researcher.