You're pledging to donate if the project hits its minimum goal and gets approved. If not, your funds will be returned.
$1,700 left to reach the funding goal.
Project summary
I'm Pham Phu-Hoa, a final-year AI undergrad at VNU-HCM University of Science in Viet Nam. My paper MIST got accepted as a poster at NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney (6-12 December), and I'm a co-first author. I saved some money from my job, but not enough for the whole trip. I'm asking for help with the rest.
My Biography: Phu-Hoa Pham - Homepage
What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?
I want to present the poster in person and talk to people working on streaming and continual learning. MIST is about decision trees that keep learning from a data stream when new classes appear, and I'd love feedback on it. I'm also planning to apply for PhD programs in AI for science, so meeting researchers in Sydney would really help me. I already applied for NeurIPS financial assistance and some travel grants, but they were all rejected.
How will you know it worked?
I'll present the poster. After that I'll post my slides and code, and write a short update here about who I talked to and what I learned.
How will this funding be used?
Total cost: about $2,930. I'm paying about $1,155 from my own savings and asking for about $1,700.
- Round-trip flight, Ho Chi Minh City to Sydney: about $885
- My share of a 4-person hotel room, 7 nights (the whole room is A$6,133 on the NeurIPS housing site, I'm splitting it with three friends): about $1,060
- NeurIPS student registration: about $310
- Visa: about $155
- Food and daily expenses (A$100 a day, 7 days): about $490
- Local transport (A$50 total): about $35
I used about 26,000 VND per USD.
Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?
It's just me. I have five papers accepted at NeurIPS 2026. I'm a co-first author of MIST and COMPOSE (both about continual learning), and I contributed to three more: SkyPart, DISCA, and the Mouse vs. AI Benchmark. In MIST, I proved a tighter bound for choosing when a streaming decision tree should split, and the average accuracy on ten benchmark streams went from 0.744 to 0.823.
Competitions I've won or placed in:
1st place in both tracks of the NeurIPS 2025 Mouse vs. AI challenge (I wrote the report: arXiv:2602.00982)
1st place in the FSE-AIware 2026 competition on dependency resolution
2nd place at SHREC 2025 (ROOMELSA), as team lead
At my university I'm in the top 3% of my cohort (GPA 9.57/10) and received two Certificates of Merit for scientific research. I do research and I work as an AI engineer at Realtime Robotics on drone image processing.
What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?
If I can't raise enough, I'll pay what I can from my savings and ask my university and employer for help. I might have to take a cheaper flight or room. If I can't go at all, NeurIPS may remove the paper from the proceedings because no author presented it in person, so the work would be lost along with my chance to share it.
How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?
Nothing so far, just my own savings from work.