RESFES 2026 KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Dr. Duc Hoang is a Research Fellow at RMIT University Vietnam and a Klingenstein Heads Fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is also the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Vietnam Institute for Advanced Studies in Mathematics (VIASM). Over the last decade, he has made significant contributions to the development of new educational policies through his work with Vietnamese government bodies and local and international NGOs. He is also a Fellow of the UNESCO Chair on Technology and Engineering Education for Children and Youth, a member of UNESCO’s Global Alliance on the Science of Learning for Education, a Grand Award Judge of Regeneron ISEF 2024 and 2025, an academy member of the Global Young Academy, and an editorial member of several journals (Higher Education, Skills and Work-based Learning; On the Horizon: The International Journal of Learning Futures; PLOS One; The Learning Organization; Journal of Comparative and International Higher Education; and Asian Education and Development Studies).

Speech: Knowledge Without Knowers? The Researcher's Job When AI Does Almost Everything

For centuries, the researcher's craft has been reading, analyzing, and writing. In just a few years, artificial intelligences, particularly large language models, have learned to do all three faster than any human. A literature review that once took months now takes an afternoon; an analysis that once filled a career can run overnight. So if machines can do the things researchers spend their lives doing, what exactly are we for? As AI floods the world with fluent, confident, and sometimes false information, the increasingly competitive skill is no longer producing knowledge but judging it, and the future belongs to those who are brave enough to ask better questions and own what they send into the world. What will that future ask of us, and what will it offer in return? When the machines can answer (almost) everything, will you still dare to ask what truly matters?