Dr Phan Thi Tuoi, a computer scientist and former rector of the HCM City University of Technology, has been named for last year' + char(39)+ N's Kovalevskaya Prize for her lifetime achievement.

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The prize, given separately in eight developing countries including Viet Nam, is named after outstanding Russian mathematician and scientist Sophia Kovalevskaya and was instituted by American academic-couple Drs Neal and Ann Koblitz in 1985 to recognise scientific research by women.

Phan Thi Tuoi is a pioneer in Viet Nam in research into natural language processing, machine translation, and text processing.

"The Kovalevskaya prize is a great honour not only for me but also for the other female staff of the university. I' + char(39)+ N'm the third teacher from the university to receive the prize," she said.

Tuoi, who graduated from Slovakia in 1977, returned to Viet Nam to work and in 1985 defended her doctorate thesis on computer processing of natural languages.

"A computer is similar to human beings. When we assign a task to it by typing text, it understands and implements. We should produce more intelligent computers so that they can help us better."

In the last 25 years Tuoi has played an important part in mapping out research steps for natural and Vietnamese language processing, improving the quality of English-Vietnamese and Vietnamese-English machine translations, and exploiting databases with Vietnamese references.

She is now acting as a guide for two PhD theses on finding English-Vietnamese phrases in machine translation and handling gaps between English and Vietnamese vocabularies.

Tuoi herself has presented around 50 papers at domestic and international conferences.

As a two-time rector, she helped her university win the Labour Hero prize.

Since retiring, she has been a Party Committee Secretary at the university.

Viet Nam' + char(39)+ N's former vice president Nguyen Thi Binh is the chairwoman of the Viet Nam Kovalevskaya Prize Committee.

The prize has so far been given to 31 individuals and 15 groups.