VinBrain wins ACM SIGAI industry award 2021 for excellence in artificial intelligence

As the world's top award in the field of artificial intelligence, this award is granted to only one AI product per year. The award will be presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2021 from August 19-26, 2021 in Canada. In 2019, the award was granted to Microsoft Corporation.

The ACM SIGAI Industry Award for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the world's top awards in the field of artificial intelligence which will be given annually to individuals or teams who have transferred original academic research into AI applications. The ACM SIGAI Award is held by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI) - the world's largest scientific and educational computing society, established in 1947 with nearly 100,000 members.

The ACM SIGAI Industry Award has been awarded since 2019. Microsoft, led by the famous AI scientist John Langford (who gained H-Index of 71 – an index indicating the influence of global scientific publications with more than 41,000 citations) was chosen as the winner of the inaugural 2019 award. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 Industry Award was unable to go forward. In 2021, the award is restarted and granted to a Make-in Vietnam product - “DrAid for Radiology” by VinBrain.

Launched on June 14th, 2020 as an intelligent assistant for radiologists, “DrAid for Radiology” is the first product of VinBrain and also the first complete AI product of healthcare in Vietnam. The product is capable of detecting and screening over 21 abnormal signs and pathologies of Lung - Heart - Bone within 5 seconds with an accuracy of over 89% and sharing diagnostic results via QR code or link. In particular, it is capable of self-warning of COVID-19, including asymptomatic cases or mild lung injury based on upright chest X-Ray and improving accuracy in addition to reducing false negatives when being used in combination with PCR test. DrAid also features the (remotely) “Consulting a second doctor” function. Enabled by images shared directly from DrAid, doctors can remotely consult with colleagues or leading experts without being affected by geographical barriers.

DrAid was highly appreciated by the ACM SIGAI selection committee because of its combination and application of the most state-of-the-art AI techniques, such as multi-class classification and structured prediction, active learning, adversarial training, convolutional networks, speech recognition for automatic medical report editing, lesion localisation on medical images with machine learning using high-tech AI based on models with hundreds of millions of pixel parameters and big data of millions of images of millions of pixels each, among others, into a comprehensive health care AI service.

Many world-famous scientists, including Professor Andrew Ng at Stanford University, also highly appreciated DrAid, especially for its practical application. Professor Andrew Ng is one of the  Top 4 of AI scientists in the world. He is also the Founder of Coursera and Google Brain and a pioneer in the field of online AI learning with 77 million users. Others include Curtis Langlotz, Stanford University, Assistant Professor and Chief of Health Services Research, Department of Radiology; Professor Al Pisano -Dean of School of Engineering, University of California San Diego (UCSD), Co-Chair of Pre-screening Committee of VinFuture Prize, etc.