Sobon Phon
Hi! I'm Phon Sobon, an AI Engineer with the Digital Transformation Working Group at the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications (MPTC) and a researcher specializing in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP). My research interests include artificial intelligence, multimodal machine learning, computer vision, NLP, and large language models (LLMs). My goal is to develop AI solutions that address real-world challenges, particularly for khmer language.
I completed the Artificial Intelligence Professional Certificate at the American University of Phnom Penh (AUPP), where I was fortunate to be advised by Dr. Rina Buoy. I received my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the RoyalUniversity of Phnom Penh (RUPP). In addition, I completed the IT Expert Program, specializing in Full-Stack Development and Data Analytics, at the Institute of Science and Technology Advanced Development (ISTAD).
If you have any questions or interested in my work, feel free to reach out to me at phon.sobon02@gmail.com.Publications & Projects
Khmer Image Description Intelligence
Vision‑language captioning for Khmer, evaluated with chrF to account for Khmer's lack of whitespace boundaries. Iterated from a from‑scratch ResNet‑101 + Bahdanau LSTM through SigLIP+mBART‑50, Florence‑2 LoRA, PaliGemma 2, and a final Qwen2.5‑VL‑3B QLoRA fine‑tune.
Khmer Auto‑Complete
LSTM‑based next‑word prediction for Khmer using word‑level tokenization, with an in‑progress small Transformer‑decoder variant trained from scratch on a 4–8 word context window.
Khmer Speech‑to‑Text Web App
FastAPI + static frontend speech‑to‑text application built around a fine‑tuned Qwen3‑ASR model for Khmer, packaged for Docker deployment.
Work Experience
AI Engineer
Researcher, Computer Vision
Data Analyst
Data Analyst Trainer
Power BI Trainer
Deputy Chief of Housing
Product Owner
Research Assistant
Web Developer
Educations
Professional Certificate, Artificial Intelligence
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science
Science and Technology Track
Industry Professional Credentials Track
Entrepreneurship and Innovation Track
AWS Academy Cloud Foundations
IT Expert Program — Full-Stack Development & Data Analytics
Awards
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Top Student, ASEAN — selected to join the US-ASEAN program.
Volunteer
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Guiding Team — CJCC, guiding volunteer.
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Sponsorship Team — Sala.co.
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Camera Assistant — Cambodia-Korea Cooperation Center (CKCC), education volunteering.