The technology group from South Korea said that with the goal of building the strongest center in Southeast Asia for artificial intelligence (AI) development, it officially opened the first Dev Center in Vietnam in late February.

It plans to announce a joint research project with Hanoi the University of Science and Technology in April.

Located in District 10, Naver's Programming Center will research, develop new features and operate features for website, mobile and desktop versions of services such as Works, a working tool that integrates functions such as mail, calender, drive and contact with a focus on internal business connections; Music, with Vibe music platform; Bboom, a community platform to help people share their thoughts and experiences; Fanship, developed from the VLive live TV application where artists and fans are connected.

The center will also come up with ideas and design new products for Naver Clova AI Lab.

The programming center is part of the project "Global AI R&D Belt" - an AI research and development cooperation network from Korea to Japan, Europe, America and Southeast Asia deployed by Naver since 2018. This will be a place for convergence and connection of Artificial Intelligence Research Departments with universities in Vietnam.

Currently, Naver is recruiting AI talents for the center. It expects to have about 300 programmers by 2023. Current vacancies include: Backend Engineer (Java), Frontend Engineer (ReactJS/VueJS), macOS Engineer (Objective-C/Swift), Windows Engineer (C/C++), Windows Engineer (C# .net), iOS Engineer (Swift), Android Engineer (Java/Kotlin), Frontend Engineer (HTML/CSS).

A Naver representative said that the four main components of the "Global AI R&D Belt" project are experts, data, infrastructure and the business market. By building the center as the main research headquarters, and connecting labs with universities, Naver is able to attract and gather many excellent AI talents in Vietnam.

According to Naver's representative, although it may not be considered as one of the world's leading countries in science and technology, Vietnam is outstanding in the field of computer science and has young IT human resources full of potential.

In fact, Naver's cooperation with two major Vietnamese universities, Hanoi University of Science and Technology and the Academy of Posts and Telecommunications Technology, has achieved many results above the initial expectations of both sides.

In particular, the research work on synonym extraction in the text environment deployed by Naver with Hanoi University of Science and Technology has brought great success when it was published at EMNLP 2021, the world's largest conference on natural language processing. It is expected that in early April, Naver and Hanoi University of Science and Technology will announce the results of five collaborative research projects in 2021, including Synonym extraction.

Van Anh

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