Le Viet Quoc, a Vietnamese researcher at Google, on the website of MIT's Technology Review magazine. He has been the first Vietnamese person being on the list of 35 Innovators under 35, selected by the magazine's editors.

HA NOI (Biz Hub) — Le Viet Quoc has become the first Vietnamese person to be on the 2014 list of 35 Innovators under 35, selected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review magazine.

The 32-year-old, who works at Google, has been selected for his techniques which prove that "machines could learn without labored assistance from humans, and reach new levels of accuracy to boot."

"The technique is now used in Google's image search and speech-recognition software. The ultra-intelligent machine Le once imagined remains distant. But seeing his ideas make software smart enough to assist people in their everyday lives feels pretty good," the magazine wrote.

Quoc was born and grew up in Huong Thuy District in the central province of Thua Thien Hue. After graduating from Hue High School for the Gifted, he studied at the Australian National University and then did PhD at Stanford University on machine intelligence.

While doing research at Stanford, Quoc "worked out a strategy that would let software learn things itself". He initiated a method known as deep learning, which uses networks of simulated neurons. In order to speed it up, he built "simulated neural networks 100 times larger that could process thousands of times more data." This gained the attention of Google, which recruited him to test it under the guidance of artificial intelligence researcher Andrew Ng.

Technology Review wrote that when Ng's results became public in 2012, it sparked a race at other technology companies such as Facebook and Microsoft to invest in deep-learning research. According to the magazine, his system had learned how to detect cats, people and more than 3,000 other objects by ingesting 10 million images from YouTube videos without any human guidance.

Initiated in 1999, the magazine's annual TR35 award is given to the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. This year, Technology Review's editors pared roughly 500 nominees to 80 finalists. Then judges from outside rated the originality and impact or potential impact of their work. These scores guided the editors as they drafted the list.

The award has earlier been granted to well-known recipients such as Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Linux developer Linus Torvalds and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. — VNS