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Cyber security is about continual change. It's about new threats appearing all the time. When you look at a city like Ho Chi Minh City, it's continually changing. There are new routes, there are new ways of doing things, new ways of getting around things. And it's exactly like the problems that we face in cyber security. 

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Dr Jonathan Crellin 

Navigating digital frontiers and cyber security 

My name's Jonathan Crellin and I'm the Program Manager in Cyber Security in the School of Science, Engineering & Technology at RMIT University in Vietnam. 

So, my background is, as I came into this domain, my first degree was in psychology. And I developed an interest in computing, and I pursued a PhD in human computer cognitive ergonomics, to think about how people interact with machines. 

And after that I went to work in universities teaching computing students. 

So, whilst I worked as a lecturer, actually I started to teach in forensic information technology. 

And this is an interesting area. It's really about understanding how people use computers when they're committing crimes to facilitate criminal activity. 

Cyber security is a critically important activity for business and we have seen major attacks on large-scale industries in many countries. 

And as a rapidly developing technical industrial nation, Vietnam is also highly vulnerable to cyber attacks. 

Now, at the moment, we're seeing new technologies appearing, particularly artificial intelligence. 

It's an interesting technology with many media reports in the last year about the development of the large language models such as ChatGPT. 

So, on the one hand, AI can be used to make things more secure, to enhance security measures by, for example, detecting pattern changes within information systems. 

On the other hand, it also presents us with particular challenges because cyber criminals can use AI in much the same way to leverage their attacks. So, things like ChatGPT help criminals create more sophisticated and personalised phishing attacks. 

So, the future of cyber security is expected to be both reactive and proactive. 

Cyber security requires creativity to address constantly changing threats motivated by, you know, the biggest motivator, which is money. 

AI may play a role in identifying unusual activities within information systems, but integrating cyber security education more effectively into general computing programs for IT departments is essential to making sure that these fundamental threats are addressed. 

While my passion is exploring these kinds of interesting areas of technology, I'm also interested in looking around at the world around me. And one of the things that's very exciting is the bustling streets of Ho Chi Minh City. 

On my Brompton bicycle, I can cycle around, I can understand and see how the city has evolved. 

And it's actually worth noting that in the digital landscape, particularly in areas like cyber security, we're seeing continuous change just as we see change around us in the city. 

Design is a global market. It could be the production of a building, a magazine or a show. The client could be from the other side of the planet. The most important thing is that students understand that there is a global culture and they can design for that culture.

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Jon Kuiter 

Shaping designers: the modern-day inventors

Hi, my name is Jon Kuiter. I joined RMIT in 2021. I am currently the coordinator for the School of Communication & Design here at Hanoi campus and I'm also an Associate Lecturer for Design Studies.

My original background was interior design and I practised that for about eight years while teaching it in Malaysia, both in Penang and KL.

Then I decided to change my design background into visual communication, and I started getting interested in the entertainment industry and concept development and speculative design for video games and film.

So now I focus on developing creative strategies and photo bashing, mixing photos together to create unique ideas from scratch.

After returning to the UK, I felt that my life made more sense in Southeast Asia. So, after my Malaysian experience, I applied to come back to Southeast Asia and Hanoi interested me.

I found that while working here, I could easily explore around Hanoi’s beautiful old town with all the little stores which have more and more independent artists practising. You've got the pottery of Bat Trang and so on [being] very much part of the city.

You've got that great mix of traditional culture and yet the modernisation of what's happening in the world and the global change of Hanoi which is really beautiful to see.

Design is a big part of economic development. Designer is the modern-day inventor. You can create something where people look at a product in a different way. You're helping to create new trends and new influence.

My students, if they're going to be designers and they're going to survive in the design industry, they could very well be based here in Vietnam, have a client from overseas, in America or something, you don't know. So, no matter where you're designing, you are globally minded.

So, design’s about problem solving. While [for] most people it’s like “problem – solution", designers are like “problem - solution A, B, C, D” and then, you know, see the different iterations and options.

I sketch all the time. Creating a sketchbook or visual journal isn't just about the sketching, there's also research. And I love to print things out on a printer or draw all over them, write on them, reflect about them, build on the ideas within existing works, and also test my own experiments as well.

Sketching is one of my key components with my students. For example, if I have a large group, I'll get my document viewer above and I'll start sketching so they can see on the projector. 

When I'm doing tutorials, I will sit with a group of students around a table. Sometimes it's a small sketchbook, sometimes it's a big piece of paper, but the idea is that we visually communicate what I'm saying. 

Being able to sit with a student and actually illustrate what they're saying, and then they illustrate what I'm saying, or go through some sort of development together, they learn a lot more in terms of the process of design. 

The students will realise that the design industry isn't just one person and the ability to work with each other is so important. That ability to talk, collaborate, even argue [about] a particular idea is really, really important. 

And the great thing about Design Studies at RMIT is every one of us has a different background and we teach many different disciplines. So, you get that extra collaboration and all that extra knowledge when we're teaching our students.

In my ongoing journey of self-discovery and finding a way to support other people, psychology always surprises me. It has not only helped me to understand other people, but it has also helped me to dig down to understand more about my own mind and my own feelings as well.

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Dr Nguyen Ngoc Quynh Anh

Driving awareness of youth mental health in Vietnam

Hi, I'm Nguyen Ngoc Quynh Anh, a Psychology lecturer at School of Science, Engineering & Technology at RMIT Vietnam, where I also take on the role of a program manager.

So I'm deeply concerned about the mental health and wellbeing of the whole society in Vietnam, especially the young people.

I have more than 15 years teaching psychology and most of the time I work with high school and university students. So, based on my teaching experience, I see that the young people in Vietnam nowadays are facing a lot of unprecedented challenges.

And most of the common pressures that I heard from the young people are excessive academic demands, uncertainty about the future, and also high parental expectations. 

So, usually they struggle with these challenges by themselves because they find it really hard to seek advice or support from the adults.

I found out that it is very important to build the inner strength for them so that they can manage their emotions, their difficulties by themselves, and they also know when and how to reach out for help when they need.

So, one of the projects I'm working right now is enhancing educators’ abilities in schools regarding mental health and wellbeing. This project comprises three main components. 

The first is raise teachers' awareness to help them understand what mental health and wellbeing is. 

Secondly, focus on building skills for teachers to recognise developing symptoms of mental health problems among their students and strategies to approach and initially support them with care and love.

And lastly, we also build up the self-care and wellbeing skills for teachers so that they know how to take care of themselves, and they also can transfer these skills to their students as well. 

So, inspiring student to love psychology is a multiple stage approach. It's about helping students understand that psychology is not just about therapy or counselling, but it is a science of everyday life, focusing on understanding the complexities of human behaviour and what’s behind the behaviour. 

Ultimately, psychology aims to help people to be happy from inside and live in harmony with other people.

So, outside of work, I indulge in various interests. I practise mindfulness every day and even when I'm too busy, I still spend about five minutes to do mindfulness to heal my feelings and to relieve myself from stress and tiredness and explore more about my personal growth.

So, devoting time to my family, especially my two children, has also been instrumental in my journey of self-discovery.

My motivation stems from my children, and by increasing mental healthcare and wellbeing for all, I believe that we can create a safer and more sustainable world for our young generation.

What I found most interesting, more than anything else, was the way that our phones have become a sort of appendage, the same way that our limbs are, as an extension of our abilities. That has prompted me to work on a current project, which is about Instagram photography in Ho Chi Minh City. 

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Dr Justin Battin

Exploring life through the lenses of social media 

My name is Justin Battin. I’m a Senior Lecturer in Professional Communication at RMIT Vietnam. My first day here at RMIT was actually my second day in the country, and before arriving, I had never been to Asia. That was about five and a half years ago.

My generation is typically quite critical of the significant use of social media today. But as I’ve engaged with academic research and insights provided by my students from here and elsewhere for several years, I’ve reckoned [with] both the pros and the cons of social media use. It has encouraged me to rethink both my previous perceptions and the more negative discourses in society. 

The camera in our phone is how we engage with the world nowadays. It is how we capture moments. Yes, moments. They’re not simply photos, but moments. 

Moments help depict perspectives of the city. Through a photo, you can feel what it’s like to be in traffic, for example. What you hear, what you smell, what you see.  

By capturing these, people learn about the city and express that understanding through photography. I think before we immediately deride what we see on Instagram as tacky or full of narcissism, and that does exist, we should also think of them as exploratory processes. Those moments are snapshots of something of significance, something to which the user feels deeply connected.

The nature of mobile phone usage here in Vietnam is quite different from the other places wherein I resided. The way my students use social media is a little bit more nuanced and unfamiliar to me. Therefore, I’ve enjoyed learning from them. They teach me about what their generation is concerned, about what problems need solving, and how they go about solving them.  

Every day when I wake up and hop on my bicycle, my preferred mode of transport, I always feel like there's going to be something new. New conversations, new discussions, new knowledge, and new collaborations.

I am fascinated by the endless array of collaborations here at RMIT – not just between my colleagues and me, but also and more importantly, collaborations with the students. 

The discussions with my students often offer me new perspectives. It’s especially interesting because my focus of research is how we use technology in our everyday environment. And they are the key users of today.

There’s definitely a nice reciprocal relationship within and beyond the classroom, and what excites me the most is how our collaborations are always driving towards solving a problem or finding a new perspective.

I teach International Business, so I believe in the concept of competitive advantages. Nobody can be perfect and it’s the same for countries. No country can be the best at everything, and we need to know what we are good at and try to maximise it.

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Dr Dang Thao Quyen

Unlocking competitive advantages in international business 

My name is Dang Thao Quyen. I’m a lecturer in International Business at RMIT University Vietnam. I’m also the Senior Program Manager of the program.

I would say international business is any business that involves an international aspect, and it’s an area in which Vietnam is thriving. 

Vietnam has been a top destination for foreign direct investment, not only in the region but also on a global scale. 

So, the FDI sector contributes around 73% of Vietnam's export turnover and around 20% of our GDP. And you know, that is very telling. 

For a long time, Vietnam’s competitive advantage was cheap labour. But now we must focus on high quality, highly productive labour.

We must think about Industry 4.0 and 5.0, how the skills in our workforce can match or even stay ahead of those trends.

Another way to gain competitive advantages is green nation branding, or become known as a country that emphasises and excels at sustainable development, while protecting the environment.

If you asked me what my personal competitive advantage is, I’d say it’s my passion for connecting and developing people. 

I did both my master’s and PhD in Australia in human resource management and international human resource management.

In my current work, I love bringing industry experts to my classroom, and doing consulting projects for companies in international expansion and human resource management.

I'm actually an introvert. So, it took lots of personal growth and stepping out of my comfort zone to get to a point where I can network with ease. What helps me is to think about the potential values for all parties.

Whenever I approach an industry partner, I think about the potential benefits for them and for my students. If we come together and share common goals and values, then that's already very good grounds to talk to each other. 

That applies to international business as well. You’ll want a win-win situation, where everybody can bring the best to the table, make the most of their competitive advantages, and create prosperity together.

Hospitality is a booming industry, especially in Vietnam. As an educator, I want to build up the next generation of hoteliers to be at the highest professional levels. 

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Dr Justin Matthew Pang

Nurturing the next generation of professional hoteliers 

My name is Dr Justin Matthew Pang. I'm a lecturer with the Tourism and Hospitality Management discipline here at RMIT Vietnam.

Before becoming an educator about 15-20 years ago, I had a long and illustrious career working in hotels and resorts across the US, the UK, the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific. 

But to start off, being a hotelier was never my first choice as a profession. I actually went to OCS - Officer Cadet School in the military and came very close to signing on as an officer of the Singapore Armed Forces. But due to a bad injury, that plan had to change.  

I came to study hotel management, and I fell in love with being a hotelier and doing hospitality. I was able to draw a lot from what I learned in the military and applied it to hotel management.   

As I moved on into my career in the hospitality line, I realised it is a fantastic line because it is really multifaceted. You have your operational departments, rooms division, food and beverage, concierge. You also have your admin and general departments, such as accounting, human resources, and marketing. And given all this, it really gives you an encompassing business.  

But every day also, having said that, in the hotel line, it's not the average run-of-the-mill job where you work behind a desk. You have different challenges every day and you just solve them.  

Services are really a part and parcel of our lives. And with regards to hospitality sector in Vietnam, it is really skyrocketing. 

The hotel market is expected to grow by about 2 billion USD between 2021 to 2026 at a compound annual growth rate of about 14%.  

Going forward, one of the most important things is to get the service standards up in Vietnam. In Vietnam, the people have always exuded a sense of hospitality, warmth and friendliness. But what we really need is to have consistency in this service. 

We want to build up the professionalism and service with standards and regulations that hotels can adhere to and to deliver that service.

Right now, the cultural perspective in Vietnam, like many other countries in Asia, is that the service line is not something that many people want to do, especially because they might be seen as being a servant.  

But that is not true, especially in Europe and America, where the hospitality line is professionalised. They have professional accreditations and certificates. 

So, we need to change the mindset of people. People who are in the service line are professionals. We want customers to say that these people, especially the hoteliers, are playing host to us rather than servicing us. 

Especially after COVID, wellbeing has been a big concern for many people. We need to ensure that hospitality professionals see this career as an opportunity to have sustainability and something that can give them a balanced lifestyle.

We don't want people coming to the industry who are young and enthusiastic and finally they burn out because they've got too much on their minds. 

We need to make sure that they have sustainable development, and have a consistent outlook to looking after themselves and also with their careers.  

Hospitality is no longer just about a business. It must encompass the community, the family, in order to have sustained growth and good development for its people.

In the future, industries, fashion brands and people they need to come together to make the earth free from pollution and a better, greener and cleaner planet to live in. My name is Rajkishore Nayak. I am working as an Associate Professor with the School of Communication & Design at RMIT University Vietnam. So, my teaching and research areas are focused on fashion sustainability. I look into the triple bottom line of sustainability which focuses on people, planet and profit. When we talk about people it relates to corporate social responsibility or CSR. So in CSR I am looking towards the working environment, the working policies, wages, ethical practices in the workplace. And when we talk about ‘planet’, I am working on sustainable development. And I am working to make fashion profitable by using alternative resources, such as new fibres, renewable energy, new technologies. We are working on technologies such as RFID, which is radio frequency identification. We are working on blockchain. We are working on automation technologies. So not only do they reduce the problem of the workers, they also reduce the amount of pollution and they reduce the carbon emissions. In the future, we can make sustainable products which are biodegradable and renewable from various sources. For example, we can use various plants like lotus, banana or wood pulp from pineapple. We can collect oyster shells, shrimp waste, crab waste or even pangasius oil to make innovative fashion productions by additive manufacturing or by 3D printing. I am also working with so many other different types of new material like recycled polyester. So we can collect different types of plastic bottles and we can convert them into new fibre which can be utilised to make new garments. Actually it is really a great pleasure to find new products or new materials, bring them into the world. It gives me immense pleasure. I think I’ll continue to do research and educate my students in the sustainability area. I would like to grow myself and grow RMIT to meet the challenges that we are facing on a global scale. And you know there are so many problems And you know there are so many problems in fashion and textile manufacturing, it can be related to the planet, it can be related to people and profit. We can collaborate with the industries and then we can bring new knowledge through research into the industry, which will be beneficial for the society to make our planet free from air, water and land pollution.

With this pace of technology development you will need to learn in advance what would be capable what would be required by the industry in the next 3 to 5 years’ time. My job as an academic is always to stay on top of the field and also hopefully to contribute to developing new knowledge in the field. My name is Pham Cong Hiep and I have been with RMIT for 12 years teaching in different degrees in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. My two main areas of research and also my ongoing professional engagement are in cyber security management and digital transformation. So, in cybersecurity, my research area focuses on the human factor how it affects the effectiveness of security programs in organisations, in government agencies and also in normal social activities. In terms of digital transformations, I am involved with looking at how technology can be applied in business contexts and how they can actually transform business operations, improve efficiency and effectiveness, and also looking at how a company can adapt to changing environments and much more disruption in the business world. For example, we're looking at how we can apply a geographical information system (GIS) in better managing agricultural activity, farmer production and also the government agencies’ management of the rural agricultural industry. Now the motivation for this project is that we observed that there's a lot of inefficiency in agricultural production. What happened is that the information from the farmers to the farming businesses, to the government was not well managed. So the system that we propose is to capture information from all three stakeholders and allow them to share and to access this information from mobile phones or from desktops. The system also feeds important information that’s relevant to the farmers who can see [what] the weather’s like in the next week or so. The businesses in the field can see the potential harvestation output so they can look at the potential market, and help the farmers to access or to reach out to the customers at a better price. Now, from the government’s perspective, they also can see what’s happening in their provinces, in their regions, and can have a better understanding of their agricultural activities. One of the key criteria when we conduct research and training at RMIT is to create an impact. Because of that, every research that we do, we also conduct an assessment of the impact, and also bring it out to the communities, to the people who can most benefit from it. The lesson that we learned here in Vietnam will definitely benefit much wider communities and actually our research can contribute in creating an impact in not just Vietnam, but also internationally.

Having worked and studied in different countries around the world informs some of my research. So we take best practices and insights from other countries and try to apply that to, for example, Vietnam. Hi. I'm Burkhard Schrage. I'm the Senior Program Manager of the Management program and also the Program Manager of the MBA program here at RMIT Vietnam. I research in strategic management, in corporate governance and also in the political economy. Much of my research is actually grounded in my personal history, if you want. So I have been working as an investment banker. And I'm currently also involved in an investment fund. And as such, I'm on the board of several companies. So many of the questions that I try to answer with my research are questions that we have that I have as a board member or as someone who was an investment banker before. And as a board member I'm basically thinking very hard about strategy and how we can compete in the marketplace. And we have a lot of discussions because there are so many options you can do, like for any business, say how should you grow faster or should you go slower? What's the regional footprint you want to have? Do you invest more in technology or do you invest more in marketing or in PR? So oftentimes I take questions from the boardroom into the classroom, but sometimes I take the answers from the classroom back into the boardroom. So there is actually a mutually benefitting sort of symbiosis between being a board member and actually also helping students to think about the questions they may think when they are running a business. Before Vietnam…You know, as a German, I studied, of course, in Germany [for] my undergraduate degree. Then I went to Paris, worked, continued to work in Paris in a bank. And after that, I went to Brazil  to work in an investment bank. And then I went to Boston, did my doctoral degree. From Boston, I went to Singapore where I became a professor of strategy. And then finally from Singapore, I came to Vietnam. What drew me to Vietnam is the ability to live in a country that is growing very fast. It's essentially transitioning from two different market systems. And essentially “getting my hands dirty” because my research is concerned with emerging market strategy and so forth. So there will be some sort of transition here towards a more service-oriented economy that is being pushed by the availability of new technologies. And the interesting part is that actually much of what people think about [as] the digital era of management or digital era of running a business, the fundamental ideas are still true. Competition works the same whether you are producing furniture or whether you're doing an e-wallet. The future of management involves thinking hard about new technologies and how we build them into our current operations. And we as academics, we have to understand so what are the best practices to embed those new technologies, to increase our profitability, to perhaps serve our stakeholders better? Because the old questions they still remain in the new era.