Vietnamese culture

The 32-year-old, who runs an Italian restaurant in Hue, noticed Vietnamese diners always ask if the restaurant has ketchup or hot sauce when eating pizza.

“We usually eat pizza without adding any sauce because it already has enough seasoning. I was surprised when customers asked for ketchup or hot sauce, which our restaurant didn’t have. Later, I bought them to meet customer demand,” Cortinovis said.

The Italian chef added pizza in Vietnam has a wider variety of toppings such as beef, chicken and pineapple. Before opening a restaurant in Hue, Cortinovis used to live in Ho Chi Minh City for a year.

“I guess there are many restaurants in Vietnam that make American-style pizzas with many types of toppings on the crust. I prefer the traditional recipe, and if anyone doesn’t like it, I will try to explain to them more about Italian cuisine,” he said.

In addition, Cortinovis noticed Vietnamese do not usually eat pizza right after it is served but often chat and eat other dishes first.

“The pizza must be eaten right away because it is still hot and a bit crunchy after getting out of the oven,” he noted.

A pizza at Marvin Lorenzo Cortinovis’s restaurant in Hue Town in central Vietnam. Photo by VnExpress/Ngan Duong.

Another difference noticed by the chef involves drinks. Normally in Italy, diners eat pizza with beer, wine or sparkling water. “I find it interesting that Vietnamese order drinks like smoothies, tea, and juices during meals. We usually don’t serve those drinks in Italian restaurants,” he said.

Cortinovis was also surprised to see Vietnamese always sharing their meals.

“In Europe, each person has their own portion and they don’t share it. For example, if I order a portion of pasta, it is only for me. But Vietnamese customers want to share their plates of pasta. It was difficult to explain it to them though now I got used to it.”

For Cortinovis, the purpose of opening a restaurant is not only for the money, but also to introduce traditional Italian cuisine to Vietnamese.

Despite the differences, he finds both cultures very interesting and appreciates them. “I have learned a lot while working with the kitchen assistant and serving customers,” he said.

Following the qualification round, ACEBEAR and BabyPhD from Vietnam, together with eight strong teams from the USA, Russia, the Republic of Korea, India and Germany, will vie for the top prize in the eight-hour finals, set to be held online at the competition’s website https://grandprix.whitehatvn.com/ on December 27.

Hosted by Vietnam under the theme of Vietnam Today, WhiteHat Grand Prix 06 has a format consisting of Jeopardy, Attack/Defence and WhiteHat Bug Bounty programmes, finding vulnerabilities on important information systems and popular software in Vietnam.

In the final round, after passing the Jeopardy challenge, 10 teams will enter the Attack/Defence phase in a simulated environment.

The organisers have built a Security Management System that uses real hardware devices for teams to fight in real life situations. The mission of the teams, on the one hand, is to attack and exploit the other team’s vulnerabilities in order to disable their security camera system and detect motion and surveillance lights, while at the same time protecting their own systems. Successful completion of the exam requires teams with practical skills as well as a deep understanding of infrastructure security, application security, encryption and web security.

The top 3 finishers in the finals will be rewarded with VND230 million (US$10,000), VND45 million (US$2,000) and VND23 million (US$1,000), respectively. In addition, teams have the chance to get bounties for each bug they find in the WhiteHat Bug Bounty.

Nguyen Thanh Phuc, Director of Authority of Information Security under the Ministry of Information and Communications, said: “In the work of ensuring network safety and security, experts play a key role. Contests like the WhiteHat Grand Prix help promote the development of human resources in cybersecurity in Vietnam, while affirming the country’s reputation in the international cybersecurity community.”

The WhiteHat Grand Prix was held for the first time at national level in 2014 and began to expand globally in 2015. Vietnam Today is the message that WhiteHat Grand Prix 06 wants to convey to the international community on a developing Vietnam with its positive cultural, economic, scientific and technical achievements.

The qualifying round attracted a record number of participants with 739 teams from 84 countries and territories around the world, including teams from the top 10 in the CTFTime rankings – the leading assessment and ranking platform in information security.

The contest, sponsored by the Ministry of Information and Communications, is being co-organised by the Bkav Corporation and the Authority of Information Security.

At the summit, the fourth of its kind, speakers from Zalo AI Lab, AWS and JAIST focused on discussing topics concerning the application of AI to reality and how to make AI more popular with the Vietnamese people.

Sharing about the journey of developing a virtual assistant in Vietnamese, owned by the Vietnamese and serving the Vietnamese, Executive Vice President Vuong Quang Khai of VNG Corporation, which owns Zalo, said: “With its superior speed in transmitting messages compared to other input methods, natural voice is the most effective means of communication between human and computer. In the next 5-10 years, voice will become a primary tool for humans in communicating with computers.”

Directly experiencing Kiki on Maserati Levante, Tran Manh Hiep, the admin of the Tinhte.vn tech forum, said: “What I like most about Kiki is that the language is very natural, bringing the feeling of chatting with a real person without any strangeness.”

Hiep also demoed Kiki’s features for in cars, including guiding the direction, playing music and answering knowledge questions.

The 2020 Zalo AI Summit welcomed two guests from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), who have directly implemented AI in many fields of business and life. My Nguyen, a representative of AWS, shared how to operate the machine learning system, one of the important aspects of AI development.

Prof. Nguyen Le Minh, Director of JAIST’s Explainable AI Centre, shares about AI via videoconference from Japan.

Speaking via videoconference from Japan, Prof. Nguyen Le Minh, Director of JAIST’s Explainable AI Centre, touched upon the solution of using the natural language processing system to help scientists better obtain information, thus contributing to the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, such as in-depth research on the virus, exploring the symptoms of the disease, psychological problems occurring under quarantine, and combating fake news.

Within the framework of the summit, the winning teams of Zalo AI Challenge shared solutions inspiring them to convincing victories.