After passing the intense selection rounds at PTIT Innovation, our team (VILUTRA) was chosen to represent the school at Coding Fest 2025 in Sydney. This is a massive playground, over 500 students, 60 projects, and heavy hitters from universities like UNSW and Macquarie.
Touching down in Sydney, it’s July, so while Vietnam is boiling, Australia is deep in winter. We walked into the University of Sydney, which honestly looks like Hogwarts with its old castle buildings, wearing so many layers we looked like marshmallows. The vibe was electric, but standing next to teams from 50 different countries, we felt small.
Yeah, and bad thing happened right away. We had printed a poster in Vietnam to save time. But when we unrolled it at the hotel, disaster. The colors were completely off, the text was unreadable. It looked amateur. We had to trash it. We spent the entire night on Canva redesigning everything from scratch, praying we could find a printer at the school the next morning.
The stress broke us a little. Because the poster changed, our presentation flow didn’t make sense anymore. Minh and Linh got into a disagreement on how to fix it, which turned into a “Silent War.” For hours, nobody spoke.
To make matters worse, we not really into the food here. We tried the famous Aussie Fish and Chips, but man, it was dry. We missed the Vietnamese sauces and flavor. We ended up running to a nearby Asian restaurant just to feel human again.
But when showtime came, we snapped out of it. We reconciled, got the poster printed, and faced the judges. They grilled us hard, especially on the “Social Impact”, asking if our AI was invading privacy. We had to think fast, explaining that our system prioritizes rescue speed over surveillance data.
And for the final result, we actually got the First Prize for Social Impact section. It was a crazy 3 days, from freezing cold and dry food to broken posters and silent fights. But looking at the trophy now, it was worth every second.
Our project, VILUTRA, tackles a scenario: losing a child in a crowded mall. Security cameras are everywhere, but they are “dumb”, they record, but they don’t help you search. We built a solution that turns those cameras into a real-time search engine. Basically, a guard can just type “girl wearing pink” or upload a photo, and the system u find that specific child across the entire camera network. It maps out exactly where they walked and where they are now, processing millions of frames in under a second.
