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FPT and NVIDIA Expand Nemotron-Personas-Vietnam Dataset by 10X Times to Power the Next Wave of Agentic AI

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HANOI, Vietnam, Oct. 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — FPT announced the expansion of Nemotron-Personas-Vietnam, its open dataset of synthetic personas grounded in Vietnam’s official demographic and labor statistics. The dataset now contains 1,000,000 personas, giving developers, researchers, and enterprises a larger and more representative foundation for building models, agents, and applications that understand Vietnamese people, language, and culture.

At a Glance

First released by FPT in collaboration with NVIDIA in June 2026, Nemotron-Personas-Vietnam is an open dataset of synthetic personas grounded in Vietnam’s official statistics from the General Statistics Office (GSO), including the Population and Housing Census 2024 and the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) 2024, as well as from FPT Smart Cloud and Quantum AI & Cyber Security Institute (FPT Corporation).

21 fields: 6 persona fields and 15 contextual fields covering persona attributes and demographics.13,000 unique full-name combinations.20 occupational categories derived from labor survey data.

Built on NVIDIA’s Nemotron-Personas methodology, which anchors persona generation in real-world statistics and uses open-weight LLMs to write high-fidelity persona narratives, the dataset gives developers realistic Vietnamese user profiles spanning age, region, occupation, income, education, and cultural context, all without any personally identifiable information (PII).

A Dataset That Understands Vietnam at Scale

This expansion is more than a larger dataset. Growing to 1,000,000 personas opens new ways for developers to build, train, and evaluate AI for Vietnam:

Finer segmentation: Users can sample highly specific slices of the Vietnamese population, such as personas that represent a retiree in Ho Chi Minh City, a smallholder farmer in the Mekong Delta, or a young engineer in Da Nang, with enough records in each to train and test reliably.Larger workloads: The expanded scale supports bigger training runs, more comprehensive red-teaming, and population-level simulations that the original release could not sustain on its own.Reduced model collapse: Richer variation in narratives, skills, and behaviors lowers the risk that models trained on the data collapse onto a narrow set of templates, a growing concern as synthetic data becomes load-bearing in AI pipelines.Deeper coverage: the earlier release sampled a set of major provinces and cities. The 1,000,000-persona version covers the whole country, so developers can build and test for users in every region.

The dataset remains fully synthetic, contains zero personally identifiable information, and is released openly under a permissive license on Hugging Face, compatible with NVIDIA NeMo libraries.

A Commitment to Vietnam’s Sovereign AI

An expansion sends a different signal than a launch. It tells developers that the resource they started building on is being maintained, grown, and invested in, not left as a one-time release.

For FPT, this is a deliberate statement of long-term commitment. Vietnam is accelerating its digital transformation. Under the newly approved Program for Digital Economy and Digital Society Development 2026-2030, the government targets the digital economy to reach approximately 30% of GDP by 2030. Across banking, finance, healthcare, insurance, retail, and public services, organizations increasingly need realistic persona data for product testing, service personalization, simulation, and AI model evaluation. By growing the dataset rather than leaving it as-is, FPT is building the data layer of Vietnam’s sovereign AI, AI grounded in the country’s own population, language, and values rather than imported from elsewhere.

Fostering Agentic AI Capabilities in Practice

As agentic AI emerges as the next frontier, systems that reason, act, and serve specific users rather than just answer prompts, the demand for grounded, identity-aware data will only grow. A larger, more representative persona dataset gives the Vietnamese AI community the foundation to build agents that genuinely understand who they are serving.  

Customer Personas: Build customer-facing agents that can draw on personas spanning income brackets, regions, and financial-literacy levels to adjust their  tone, product recommendations, and compliance handling for each customer, such as a retiree in Hanoi versus a young professional in Ho Chi Minh City.

Simulation and Evaluation for Agentic Systems: Create simulation environments populated with realistic Vietnamese users and organizations, run red-teaming and bias-and-fairness evaluations across diverse demographic groups, and stress-test how agents behave across regions, ages, and occupations, all without touching real customer data.

Domain-Specific AI Agents: Enable specialized AI agents across regulated industries, including finance, healthcare, insurance, and public services, that need to reason about who they are helping. A healthcare agent can be evaluated against patient personas spanning literacy levels, regions, and care settings. A public-service agent can be tested against citizen-personas across the country’s administrative landscape.

Download the dataset for free on Hugging Face.

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SOURCE FPT Corporation (FPT)

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Crab2B Makes AsiaWorld-Expo Debut, Connecting Hong Kong’s Mobile Wholesalers with Global Buyers

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HONG KONG, Oct. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Crab2B, a pioneering B2B trading platform dedicated to mobile devices and digital products, will make its debut at the HKICEC Global Mobile Exchange Pavilion during the Global Sources Hong Kong Shows, opening at AsiaWorld-Expo on October 18, 2026.

Hong Kong has long been a major hub for electronics wholesale trade, but buyers still often rely on fragmented channels to identify suppliers. Crab2B was created to bridge this gap, bringing Hong Kong-based mobile and digital product wholesalers together on one dedicated B2B platform. Headquartered in Hong Kong, Crab2B combines the manufacturing strength of mainland China and the Greater Bay Area’s extensive supply chain capabilities with Hong Kong’s established global trading network. Together, these strengths enable Crab2B to simplify cross-border sourcing, connect buyers directly with suppliers and make international trade more accessible and efficient.

For its first appearance at a major industry trade show, Crab2B is bringing together more than 200 merchants already registered on the platform, marking a significant milestone in its development. The Crab2B booth is expected to attract electronics traders from Southeast Asia, Europe, the Middle East and beyond. Visitors will be able to discover the app’s capabilities through live demonstrations, register on the platform and connect directly with participating merchants to explore business opportunities.

A buyer who experienced the Crab2B app shared: “With Crab2B, we no longer have to search far and wide for reliable suppliers. The platform brings Hong Kong’s mobile phone wholesalers together in one place, giving us greater visibility into available products and sourcing opportunities. Whether I’m at my desk or on the move, I can find products and connect with suppliers whenever I need to. For businesses like ours that source across borders, that kind of access makes a real difference. It saves time, reduces transaction costs and helps us do business more efficiently.”

Crab2B CEO Luo Yaohong said, “We want to be pioneers in cross-border B2B trading for digital products, creating new opportunities for Hong Kong’s wholesale industry. As Hong Kong places greater emphasis on developing digital trade, we’re addressing a longstanding gap in the market with a dedicated digital platform that connects Hong Kong’s electronics suppliers directly with buyers around the world. Our ambition is to make cross-border trading easier, faster and more accessible, while helping Hong Kong businesses reach new markets.”

The platform’s trade show debut is also attracting attention from international merchants, with exhibitors expressing interest in joining Crab2B to expand their reach into overseas markets. Meanwhile, merchants already registered on the platform are looking forward to the launch of its planned online marketplace, which will create further opportunities for sustained collaboration and business growth.

Building on this debut, Crab2B will remain firmly rooted in Hong Kong while expanding its connections with businesses around the world. The company will continue to enhance its platform with smarter sourcing tools, more comprehensive trading capabilities and an increasingly connected network of suppliers and buyers. By making it easier to discover products, establish business relationships and conduct cross-border transactions, Crab2B aims to open new opportunities for merchants of all sizes and help shape the next chapter of Hong Kong’s digital trade industry.

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SOURCE Crab2B

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Canton Fair Buyers Alliance Launched as the 140th Edition Opens

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GUANGZHOU, China, Oct. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — On October 15, the Canton Fair Buyers Alliance was officially launched at the Canton Fair Complex, marking a significant milestone as the fair celebrates the 70th anniversary of its founding.

More than 140 overseas buyers attended the launch ceremony, highlighting the fair’s enduring role as a bridge connecting global commerce with China’s export sector.

Speaking at the ceremony, Luís Vilariça, CEO of Joinco, Import & Export, Ltd., discussed his company’s long-standing relationship with the Canton Fair. Drawing on years of participation, he reflected on the growth opportunities created through cooperation with Chinese suppliers and highlighted the fair’s role in supporting international business development and global trade exchanges.

The ceremony also featured a joint declaration by alliance members. Representatives from five member companies read the statement in their respective native languages, underscoring the international character of the new organization. Additional members sent video congratulatory messages, joining the celebration and witnessing the official launch of the alliance.

The Canton Fair Buyers Alliance represents one of the fair’s key service innovations. Designed primarily for Fortune Global 500 companies, buyers from the world’s top 250 retailers and leading sourcing enterprises across a diverse range of markets, the alliance aims to offer members a platform for information sharing and resource coordination. The first cohort of alliance members includes 58 companies from 32 countries and regions across 5 continents. Through the alliance, members will gain access to a range of priority benefits spanning four major areas: services, events, resources and information.

 For more convenient attendance, please click here for pre-registration:

https://buyer.cantonfair.org.cn/register/buyer/email?source_type=16

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SOURCE Canton Fair

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Bioethanol from human hair – Indian start-up’s solution to rising prices of grains and sugar

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GUJARAT, India, Oct. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — In what could be called the beginning of the 5G (fifth-generation) of bioethanol or non-cellulosic bioethanol or non-sugar-based biofuels, an Indian start-up, Techofest Global, based out of Gujarat, has developed its own, indigenous, and patented technology for the production of bioethanol from waste human hair. Such processes would significantly reduce the employment of sugars, grains, and agricultural residues, which form the classical first- and second-generation bioethanol feedstocks. As a result, the rising fuel-vs.-food/fodder debate is anticipated to reduce, and instead, ethanol produced from municipal/industrial waste, after trials, can supplement the current supply being used as blends with presently retailed fossil fuels (E20, E27, etc.). 

As stated by Dr. Ravi, the founder-CEO of Techofest Global, the strategic priority and the USP of the start-up is industrial symbiosis, which, typically, involves an ecosystem of up-cycling/valorising the effluents of an industry, thereby creating a value-chain for residues often lacking an end-of-life. With more than three decades of experience in designing customized nuclear fusion reactors for international programmes, such as ITER, JET/UKAEA and SST-1, Dr. Ravi, a seasoned mechanical engineer, spearheads the start-up’s patented technologies’ scale-up and commercialization.

Two biochemical engineers, Dr. Navnit – the former CTO, and Dr. Kabilan – the former CEO of Biomakerz, Chennai, are the brains behind the current technology/process portfolio of the joint-venture between Techofest Global and Biomakerz. They have been working on biorefineries’ process intensification for more than a decade. “Having foreseen the fuel-vs-fodder/food competition as early as the year 2015, we began developing techno-economically feasible and viable in-vitro metabolically-engineered bioprocesses for scaling-up ethanol production from municipal waste streams between 2019–2021”, says Navnit. After developing operational technologies for international biofuel organizations, serving process engineer roles with certain biorefineries-related OMC R&D’s of India, Dr. Navnit, presently works for a premier academic institution.

An on-going fermentation trial at the Techofest Global-Biomakerz JV’s R&D facility

Techofest Global has developed and tested, in its R&D JV’s pilot-facility of ~100-L, 3 innovative and cost-effective technologies, such as 5G ethanol production using human hair, used cooking oil (UCO), and enriched bio-methane production from disposed sanitary napkins.

“With massive CapEx and OpEx, 2G ethanol technology is facing a major commercialization bottleneck, owing to competition with food/livestock fodder, requirement of a cost-intensive pre-treatment procedure, and the requirement of cellulolytic cocktails, which have a poor recycle efficiency. The proprietary 5G SAFE process developed for the start-up circumvents the mentioned constraints, and instead, utilizes a single-stage saccharification followed by fermentation, and records over 85–90% biocatalyst recovery. Likewise, the proprietary SIM process for bio-methane production, exclusively developed for the start-up, is 2x faster with improved intermittent feeding cycles and continuous gas harvest”, says Navnit.

“With on-going pre-commercialization trials, the proprietary ethanol and bio-methane processes of ours are soon being commercialized”, says Ms. Bhumika, the co-founder and the corporate advisor of the start-up. Furthermore, Mr. Ronak pilots the organization’s global market entry and commercialization frontier.

Techofest Global’s veteran Principal Technology Advisors include: Dr VS Tripathi, former Joint Director, DRDE Gwalior, Dr B S Munjal, former Director, Structures and Thermal group, SAC/ISRO, Academician and Advisor CIKS-Dharohar, GTU, and Dr AV Santhanababu, former Scientist at Satish Dhawan Space Centre. With on-going R&D activities, Dr. Munjal says, “the start-up is striving to provide a unique solution along the lines of the Atmanirbhar and Viksit Bharat Vision 2047”.

Media Contact: www.techofestglobal.com; e-mail: info@techofestglobal.com; contact person: The PR team of Techofest Global.

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