Hoang M. Dao

Hoang M. Dao has been a Ph.D. student in the MOSAIC group since November 2023. He is from Thai Nguyen, Vietnam.

Hoang obtained his M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics and Informatics at Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST) in 2022. In 2023, he completed a second M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Clermont Auvergne in France.

Back in high school, Hoang participated in several mathematics competitions, including the Vietnamese Mathematical Olympiad. During his undergraduate period, he also worked as an AI engineer on several projects related to natural language processing, computer vision, and data analysis at CMC Corporation. After graduating, he changed his field of interest to optimization and joined an Operations Research team at Smartlog Corporation, where he built a framework for solving a general problem for Vehicle Routing from scratch. During that time, he also collaborated on several research projects on applications of optimization in engineering and logistics.

Inspired by his mentor, who is a mathematician, Hoang then pursued more abstract mathematics. For his second M.Sc. degree, he studied Persistent Homology, Category Theory, and Group Theory with applications in Machine Learning in mind, and he had an internship on Hopf algebras at the Laboratoire de Mathématiques Blaise Pascal.

The Ph.D. project of Hoang is joint in collaboration with Prof. Peter Stadler and his group at the University of Leipzig. It is part of the School of Embedded Composite Artificial Intelligence (SECAI), one of three DAAD-funded Konrad Zuse Schools of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence in Germany. In his Ph.D. project, Hoang works on the mathematical characterization of high-dimensional loss/energy/fitness landscapes. He investigates modern techniques from AI and computational statistics to discover and characterize pertinent landscape features and develop methods that use knowledge of such features sampled at runtime to guide and improve optimization algorithms.