For Võ Ngọc Minh Anh, an Information Technology student at VNUHCM-University of Science, technology transcends mere dry lines of code. The discipline serves as a tool to solve social problems and acts as a bridge to create positive value for the community. The journey of the student recently honoured in the Top 20 of the Female Students in Science and Technology Award is a testament to a spirit of ‘dedication,’ ‘real-world application,’ and a clear philosophy: always prioritising projects that directly benefit the user.

 ‘Answering with Results’

Minh Anh’s passion for technology began in secondary school with the Pascal programming language. She recounted feeling a sense of wonder after ‘writing a few lines of code and seeing the idea run.’ In university, upon encountering AI and Data Science, she realised technology offered a powerful instrument to address social issues in education, healthcare, and equality. Like many female students, Minh Anh once faced the prejudice that ‘engineering is for men,’ but she chose a determined way to overcome this: ‘answering with results.’

Instead of debating, Minh Anh focused on action, personally handling data, training models, and writing reports. The student has competed in contests such as UIT Data Science Challenge (First Prize, 2023), HackHCMC (Second Prize, 2024), and AI Hackathon (Second Prize, 2025). Furthermore, Minh Anh has authored and co-authored prestigious international research papers, including VCED and HORUS.

Moreover, the student actively shares knowledge, encouraging and mentoring younger female students. Minh Anh’s research achievements are closely linked to practical problems in Viet Nam. The most notable work is ‘VCED’—a Vietnamese cosmetics consultation chatbot model, accepted at the FETC 2025 International Conference.

This is not a typical chatbot. The model developed by Minh Anh and her colleagues uses a two-stage RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) architecture. This approach enables the chatbot both to retrieve specialised documentation and to analyse context (such as skin type and habits) to provide precise, natural consultation ‘like a real expert.’ The system was trained using actual Vietnamese data and integrated directly into Messenger to reach users in the most convenient manner.

Additionally, she is a co-author of ‘HORUS’—a multimodal AI system (understanding images, audio, and dialogue) for searching videos using natural language, presented at the MMM 2025 Conference.

A Bridge Between People for Shared Knowledge

Although she has accumulated numerous achievements, the most memorable turning point for Minh Anh was the moment she presented a different research idea at the Ho Chi Minh City International Student Science Forum 2024 (ISSF 2024). This project involved applying the RAG chatbot to support gender equality and legal consultation for women. To achieve these user-focused results, Minh Anh overcame considerable challenges, primarily the lack of resources and limitations concerning computational equipment (GPU). The student firmly believes: “In research, what matters is not how many tools you possess, but how much willpower and intellectual curiosity you hold.”

This journey has been supported by several sources of inspiration. From family, with the teaching that ‘strength lies in daring to move forward.’ From the academic environment, with Dr Lê Duy Tân (International University), who instilled research discipline and data-driven critical thinking. And from the enterprise mentor Lê Anh Tiến (Chatbot Viet Nam), who imparted the spirit of ‘dedication’ and the requirement that a ‘real product’ must serve as the standard for knowledge validation.

The ‘real-world application’ environment at VNUHCM, where students are encouraged to join labs early, closely connect with businesses, and work across multiple disciplines, has facilitated Minh Anh’s growth. She learned the ‘system thinking’ needed to complete the entire cycle: from problem, data, model, and evaluation to deployment, alongside the academic discipline ensuring every result is reproducible.

Currently, Minh Anh is working as a Junior AI Engineer at Ocany Viet Nam. For Minh Anh, the Female Students in Science and Technology Award is not a ‘destination’ but a ‘new starting point.’ She plans to continue delving deeper into multimodal RAG/LLM for the Vietnamese language, developing AI products with social impact, and especially mentoring, sharing resources with female students wishing to pursue AI.