1. Myself: Hi, my name is Vu Viet Trung (lets call me Trung). Im 23 years old.

Im a senior student at Hanoi University of Science and Technology, majoring in Information Technology. My main interest is Computer Science, and I would like to study abroad for this major. Im studying English hard in order to help me fulfill my ambition. As for my life outside of the university, I was born and raised in Hanoi. I live in Cau Giay District with my family, which consists of my parents, my twin brother and myself. Both of my parents are now retired. My hobbies are reading, watching movies and playing sports. 2. Education background: I did Information Technology at the Center for Training of Excellent Students, which is a special training program of my school in university. Its a fascinating stuff for me to learn different subjects in CS like Programming Language, Computer Architecture, Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence and even Mathematics, Probability and Statistics. What often makes my friends surprised in my course is that it turns out to be mostly about Math. And in university I was taught how to apply it in my field. You know, math formulas appear regularly in every subject, and more often than not, my lecturers give us some equations before explaining in detail what were about to learn in the class. So I would say the first thing Ive learn from university is Mathematics. Fortunately, it turns out that I like Math. I also learned how to write an efficient program. That, instead of lengthening my code to build a large complicated program, its more worthwhile coding a simple one with better algorithms, which could help me save time and cost of running the application. I learned that in order to be a programmer, I dont need to know every line of code exactly but alternatively, I just need to know where I can find it or how I can do it. The course I like most in my university is Artificial Intelligence, which is a branch of CS that studies and develops intelligent machines and software. Im really interested in this field as it give me a better understanding of human-computer interaction. Also, doing this stuff always excites me by raising such questions like is there an essential gap between HI and AI? Or can a machine feel or think like a human? 3. Research interests: My first and most successful research project is about fuzzy logic, which is often considered as an extension of classical logic. Ive joined on this project for 2 years, with other 2 students, one is my classmate and one is a fellow student of Dr. Tran Duc Khanh, who is the project supervisor. Our aim is to build a fuzzy linguistic logic based on a special algebra structure called refined hedge algebra. We defined adequately the syntax and semantics of our fuzzy linguistic propositional logic, and proved successfully the soundness and completeness of an inference rule on it. Our team has a lot of helpful discussions, also via email, and also thanks to Dr. Khanh professional guidance and enthusiasm, weve recently published 2 papers on international conferences, namely, Fuzz IEEE 2012 and KSE 2013. What Ive learned after this project are how to do an research, writing a research paper, how to keep in touch with other members, presentation and teamwork skill and so on. However, the most important research project is the one I started 2 months ago. Its also my undergraduate thesis. The project named Abstractive Text Summarization, supervised by Associated Professor Le Thanh Huong, who is the lecturer of my AI course too. Regarding the research purpose, automatic summarization which is one of major tasks in Natural Language Processing , our system is aimed to generate a summary of a chunk of text in a specific category (for example, financial section), based on its internal semantics. You can think about one of its application in search engines such as Google, which information is searched directly on the automatically created summaries for documents rather than these documents themselves. Although theres still many thing to do so as to get a practical result, I hope the research could contribute to this field as a new approach, especially in Vietnamese language area, where very little studies have been done on. 4. Background knowledge: Im going to talk about the concept of NLP. Natural Language Processing is a field of AI which involves linguistics, understanding natural language and enabling computers to derive meaning from human input. As natural language understanding improve, computers will be able to learn from the gathered information and apply what they learned into the real world. Combine with natural

language generation, computers will become more and more capable of receiving and giving instructions. We can see that NLP is so close to AI, in general both involved the problem of making machine as intelligent as human. Modern NLP algorithms are based on machine learning, specifically statistical machine learning. That is automatically learn the rules or the pattern for natural language from a large amount of real-world examples. In other words, we train the computers like the way we teach our children through our experiences. Statistical NLP today is one of the cutting-edge research topics in this field, comprising all quantitative approaches to automated language processing, including probabilistic modeling, information theory, and linear algebra. 5. Education goals: I want it because it allows me to take a broader view. Doing a PhD in CS helps me figure out the cutting-edge in my field, identifying the current state-of-art in Computer Science. I can see myself intellectually curious. I like doing research, working on the hardest problems that the rest of the world hasnt even know yet. PhD-level research enables me to define new things, solving problems and carving my own niche in the field. I dont think doing a Masters degree is suitable for me. Its expensive and not really useful as I still want to do a PhD after all, meanwhile I can learn the same material as an undergrad. Moreover, PhD programs dont generally care whether I have a Masters or not. And on top of that, my focus is on research, so a lot of required classes in a Masters program is clearly unreasonable for me. As I said before, Im really interested in NLP. So several topics I want to pursue is automatic summarization, co-reference resolution (which involves determining the referent object of words), and machine translation (which is the process of automatically translate text from one language to another). I believe itll be much helpful to study these stuff. Despite considerable achievements in NLP for English, there are remarkable discrepancies between English and Vietnamese. And I hope I can apply what I learned in my PhD program to build our own language processing system. 6. Career goals: I want to be an IT specialist in either a research labs of an institute or an R&D department of an industrial company. I think its my long-term career with opportunities for using my skills in the best possible way. Also, this helps me keep up with the cutting edge of technologies, which is always what I concern. So a PhD program is essential for my career goal. This scholarship helps me a lot in supporting the tuition fees as well as living costs abroad, because actually I only have a limit resource for my study as my parents both retired. 7. Program and country choice: Inclined toward academic research, I think the US is my perfect choice for higher education, where I can meet the top-notch edges in my field, having the best possible equipment and resources. Plus, an important reason is the availability of financial aid which many universities here offer as long as I can prove my excellence in academics. And on top of that, studying in the US would enrich my life not only academically but also personally because of the international diversity of US universities. Around 30% of international students in the world study in the US, which could help me learn a lot more about the world through the exciting cultural exchange. Therefore, being a part of this international clan/community of expert and qualified professionals is (definitely) my dream. (why not Japan/Europe)