Horizons | CNRS Networks cnrs I international w 32 magazine china laos thailand cambodia Vietnam With many initiatives in promising disciplines like energy, marine or space sciences, Vietnam asserts its ambition to quickly become a knowledge-based economy with an international scope. The country is thus emerging as a much sought-after scientific partner. A Rising Star in Asia by Séverine Lemaire-Duparcq Making its centralized administration more flexible and joining the race in the highly-competitive global knowledge market: this is the challenge that Vietnam is taking on today. Alongside traditional disciplines like physics, chemistry, and mathematics, the country is developing new research fields of international interest, including space research, marine sciences, nanotechnology, and materials sciences, with promising and sometimes even spectacular results. Space science provides a good illustration. In 2008, barely two years after the Space Technology Institute was set up by the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (VAST), the country achieved an outer space milestone with the launch of its first telecommunications satellite from Kourou (French Guiana). Three years later, VAST followed up on this success by opening the Vietnam National Satellite Center, which scored another triumph in May 2013, again from Kourou, when Vietnam’s first environmental monitoring satellite was put into orbit. The country’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2007 sped up reforms, also affecting the country’s scientific governance. A national research funding agency was set up by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST), along with a close-knit network of regional offices and of information, orientation, evaluation, and technology transfer structures. Univers ity par tners hips In addition to established research institutions like VAST, Vietnam opened public universities with international ambitions over the last 5 years. Among these, the Vietnamese-German University (VGU) in Ho Chi Minh City was founded in 2008. Similarly, the University of Science and Technology of Hanoi Signed in 2006, the UMI MICA (Multimedia, Information, Communication and Applications) was created to accelerate the development of information technology in Vietnam. It involves more than 100 researchers, postdocs, and graduate students. As a measure of its success and contribution, MICA was granted the Vietnamese Research Institute status in 2010. Its expertise includes natural language and speech processing, image and video processing, and human-computer interaction. Among a broad range of research projects (more than 50 in total), MICA has just launched the AUCO (AUdio COrpora) collection, which combines documentation and research on the astounding linguistic diversity of Southeast Asia. Ho Chi Minh City Hanoi For fur ther inf orma tion: > www.mica.edu.vn 01 Recording sessions of Mo Piu, an endangered language spoken in North Vietnam. 01 © UMI MICA MICA: A Succ essfu l Collabora tion key figur es 88.8 million inhabitan ts 24,000 researc hers 0.65% of GDP alloca ted to R&D in 2010 €500 million overa ll r&D budg et in 2010, 70% publicly fund ed 6.5% averag e annua l gDP gr owth sinc e 2008 833 ar ticles published in 2010, of which 59 co-published with CNRS © ESA–S. Corva ja, 2013
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