Viettel opens data for candidates to develop AI

At the launching ceremony of Viettel AI Race 2026 on July 2, Viettel said the competition is aimed at the artificial intelligence research and development community at home and abroad. Held last year, the highlight of this year's competition season is that excellent teams will have access to real data, work directly with experts and solve problems that are being posed in the production and business activities of this group.

Mr. Bui Truong Vinh, Deputy Head of Viettel Technology Department, said that this data has been processed to meet legal regulations on data protection. "The technical team also completed de-identification before giving it to the competing teams, ensuring not to violate regulations and helping them access data sets that are not available outside," he said.

The domestic and foreign artificial intelligence research and development community can participate in the competition as individuals or in groups of up to three people.

This year, three topics were given: BTS Digital Twin, requiring teams to reconstruct 3D digital twins for BTS stations, in the field of computer vision; LLM Inference Optimization focuses on optimizing large language model operations; and Ontological Reasoning in Medical Knowledge Retrieval aims at retrieving and inferring medical knowledge, in the field of natural language processing.

According to Mr. Vinh, the topics all come from practical problems that units in the group are researching and have certain solutions. "We expect the community to bring new solutions and new, more optimal ways of doing things. This is not only an opportunity for teams to demonstrate their capabilities but also helps us approach new solutions," he said.

In last year's competition, teams were provided with computational infrastructure and used simulated data, while this year, the business decided to open up real data sets. This helps competition teams access data that is close to reality, thereby providing accurate solutions and operating more effectively.

For example, with the BTS Digital Twin exam, candidates will work on the data set collected and enriched by Viettel during the operation of the nationwide telecommunications network. According to Mr. Vinh, this is a large source of data that only businesses possess thanks to many years of exploiting network infrastructure.

"AI only really creates value when it is placed in real problems, real data and real operating requirements," shared Ms. Vu Thi Mai, head of Viettel Group's human resources organization department. According to a representative of the organizing committee, the competition not only aims to find teams with good professional capabilities, but also aims to build an AI community capable of solving practical problems.

The competition takes place in three rounds, from July to September. After the online preliminary round, 24 excellent teams will attend the hackathon round in Hanoi, where they will have access to real data and work directly with Viettel experts to perfect the solution. The final brings together the 12 strongest teams.

Luu Quy