Courses & Events
From Vietnam to Silicon Valley – A Journey in Nurturing AI Talents
Tuesday, Oct 28, 2025
04:30 pm - 05:50 pm
Our seminar series on Innovation in AI in Asia continues with guest speaker, Thang Luong, Co-founder of VietAI and a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Thang will highlight his VietAI project that aims to build up the human resources necessary for Vietnam to flourish in the AI era.
Shixiang Shane Gu, Senior Staff Research Scientist from Google DeepMind, will serve as host and moderator.
In this talk, Thang will share my journey in nurturing young AI talents from Vietnam to Silicon Valley. It started out in 2018, as VietAI, a national movement in AI education, and later transformed into New Turing InstituteI, a Silicon-Valley AI ecosystem for Southeast Asia and beyond.
Open to the public at no charge for in-person or by Zoom attendance. Seminars will take place on most Tuesdays between September 23 – December 2, 2025.
Details
Our seminars will be offered in a hybrid format.
Registration:
- To attend in-person, please RSVP here.
- To attend by Zoom, please register here.
Agenda:
- 4:30 – 5:50 pm Discussion and Audience Q&A
- 5:50 – 6:30 pm Networking over light refreshments
Venue:
- Stanford University, Bishop Auditorium, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305 [Google Map]
Parking options:
- Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305 [Google Map]
- Lasuen St. and Roth Way, Stanford, CA 94305 [Google Map]
- Please check parking signs carefully to ensure that permitted parking (A or C) and metered spaces are free after 4:00 pm. Paid parking is enforced around The Oval until 6:00 pm.
Session Recordings are typically posted within 3 business days after each session on our Youtube Channel and the course page here.
Speakers
Thang Luong
Co-founder, VietAI and Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google DeepMind
TDr. Thang Luong is a Principal Scientist and Director of Research at Google DeepMind. After earning his PhD from Stanford in 2016, his LuongAttention invention was key to upgrading Google Translate in 2017. At Google, Dr. Luong co-founded Project Meena (2020), which evolved into LaMDA, and co-led multimodal development for Bard, the precursor to Gemini. Since 2024, his Superhuman Reasoning team has produced AlphaGeometry (Nature publication), AlphaProof (IMO Silver, 2024), and Gemini Deep Think (IMO Gold, 2025). His honors include Google DeepRank Innovator award (2021), NUS Outstanding Young Computing Alumni Award (2023), Google DeepMind Tech Impact Award (2024), and most recently the 2025 ACL 10-year Test-of-Time Award. His works have been featured multiple times on major media outlets such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg. Outside of Google, Dr. Luong is also a co-founder of New Turing Institute (formerly VietAI), a non-profit organization that aims to nurture AI talents in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Host & Moderator: Shixiang Shane Gu
Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google DeepMind
Shixiang Shane Gu is a Senior Staff Research Scientist in Google DeepMind, where he leads a team in Gemini Thinking and Post-Training. Previously, he led Multilinguality team in Gemini Post-Training, was a senior researcher in the ChatGPT team at OpenAI, an ex–Research Scientist at Google Research, Brain Team and a Visiting Associate Professor (Adjunct Professor) at the University of Tokyo. Shane holds PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, supervised by Richard E. Turner, Zoubin Ghahramani, and Bernhard Schölkopf. Shane holds B.ASc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto, supervised by the thesis advisor Geoffrey E. Hinton. Shane previously was also a visiting scholar at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University hosted by Emma Brunskill. Shane’s academic work received Best Paper Award at CoRL 2019, Google Focused Research Award, Cambridge-Tübingen PhD Fellowship, and NSERC Scholarship, and was featured in Google Research Blogpost and MIT Technology Review. Shane is a Japan-born Chinese Canadian, and he speaks, reads, and writes in three languages.
