* Senior undergraduate or graduate students are strongly encouraged to apply.

Overview: VNG Corporation is a multi-million dollar company that provides a wide array of Internet related services. Zing products such as ZingMe, Zing Mp3, 123mua or online game products are among our most recognized products in Vietnam. Our mission is to make Internet change every ones life by providing the best online entertainment and collaboration experience. We believe that technology is the core value of our success. To realize this goal, we founded an R&D team within our company. Currently, our web service business serves millions of customers. Every second, our system responds to thousands of I/O requests. Every day, we collect gigabytes of data. Our system has reached a scale that no traditional complex database management systems can support. Building an in-house high performance, scalable and reliable core data system with extremely strict quality of service requirements is critical to our business. On the top of that, the large amount of data collected from our web services enables us to perform sophisticated and complex data analysis to provide excellent ad service. The enormous size of the fast growing collected data demands the data analysis algorithms to be not only effective but also very efficient in order for the statistic reports to be computed in real-time. These together create a dynamic and unique opportunity for solving the latest research problems which cover a wide array of topics including high performance data management system, social network analysis, text mining, web search, and large scale data analysis. In our team, you are expected to work with partners to identify important and new features that are valuable to our business. You are also responsible for researching, implementing, and evaluating these features. Producing high quality research papers in the form of either novel method evaluation or solution comparison analysis is recommended at the end of each project. Projects at VNG Research: Recommender system Given that only a small fraction of data that a user can view on a web page, we have to wisely select the right information that are best suited to our users. We are currently developing several recommender algorithms to compute and rank information that are the most relevant to our users based on which the web pages will be customized. Some examples of our developed recommender systems are feed recommendation in Zing Me and music recommendation in Zing Mp3. Image processing Half million of photos uploaded to our social network Zing Me daily. We are working on algorithms that can detect human face so that our users can easily tag their friends and share those tagging information. Even though face detection has been widely used, there are still many research problems that need to be solved. They includes detecting non standard face features and positions (e.g. side face, glasses) and extracting information from detected faces (e.g. user identification, age, gender). Another work in the image processing lab is porn detection. With the popularity of our photo uploading service, it is inevitable that porn photos are also uploaded. It is non-trivial to detect them manually. Our goal is to develop algorithms that can detect porn with high precision rate. Search engine As the largest online content provider in the nation, search engine is an essential core component of all of our products. Our current projects are working on improving the quality and scalability of the search engine. Another important project is social web search. When a user search for a person, the social web search should rank people not only based on name similarity but also based on user proximity.

Spam detection In this research, we aim at detecting spam messages that are sent between users. In this project, in addition to the content, we are also investigating the possibility of using user profile, friend network and unlike tags to improve the precision rate of the existing spam detection algorithms. Text mining The communication between users provides valuable insight about our users. Text analysis techniques such as keyword extraction, semantic web, or topic identification enable the possibility of identifying major events in our network and building user profiles which can be used for webpage personalization. Social network This research is a combination of text mining, graph mining, graph visualization research. The social network research allows us to extract information from our social network as a whole. The results of this research can be used to identify discussion, groups with common interested, influential nodes, and to benchmark the quality of our social network. Viral Marketing As the leading social network provider in the nation, our social network allows us to provide a powerful ad platform to our business partners where viral marketing is integrated as a major component. By being able to construct user profiles for all members in the network, being able to identify groups with common interests, and being able to understand the communication patterns, an ad placement strategy can be used to maximize the impression rate for the ads. This will significantly improve the effectiveness of our ad platform. Work Environment: This research focused environment is ideal for individuals seeking to work for a high tech and innovation company with cutting edge technologies built domestically. It is also ideal for individuals seeking to advance their study in high quality institutions oversea by having hand on experiences with the latest research challenges applied in real world problems and by having strong recommendation letter from our PhDs graduated oversea. Collaboration opportunity with research labs from top-tier international institutions is also available. Job Title: Software Engineer Job Type: Full-time, part-time Location: Ha Noi, Ho Chi Minh Key Areas of Responsibility: Participate in the research and design of new high performance, cloud computing, social network, ad platform, or social web/data mining features Work with partners to define these new features Work with development team to implement and test these new features. Qualifications: Problem solving and analytical skill Research experience is a major plus Senior, master, or PhD students interested in doing research are strongly encouraged to apply. Flexible working hours are available. For data analysis position: Non Computer Science background candidates with strong statistic skills are strongly encouraged to apply For text analysis and text search position:

Experience with natural language processing, text mining, semantic web, or web search/web crawler
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 For social network related position: Experience with graph mining or social network algorithms
*Our compensation includes bonus and flexible working hours. In addition, we provide a strong environment for research and innovation. Contact: Above are the projects at VNG Research where we are building an R&D team with exceptional technical and analytical skills, if you are interested and feel that you like working on challenging projects in a dynamic and strong technical environment, please send your CVs to: Minh Quoc Nguyen, PhD. R&D Manager VNG Corporation minhnq@vng.com.vn http://www.vng.com.vn/ Biography: Dr. Minh Quoc Nguyen received a Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include system, data mining, database, machine learning, and social network. Dr. Minh received a VEF fellowship grant in 2004. Currently, he works as a research manager (Web Tech) of VNG Corporation. His roles are to build and to lead an R&D team to develop the infrastructure of the web service group of the company.