CONGRATULATIONS TO DR. SON MINH NGUYEN

We are delighted to congratulate Dr. Son Minh Nguyen on successfully defending his PhD thesis titled: “Underspecification of Transformers in Indoor Localization and Indoor Navigation” on Thursday, 16 October 2025, at the University of Twente.

In his thesis, Son explored the limitations of transformer architectures — widely used in language and vision models — when applied to indoor localization and navigation. His research identified fundamental challenges in adapting these models to domain-specific modalities such as Received Signal Strength (RSS) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) signals, and introduced several innovative solutions to enhance their performance and generalization.

Key contributions of his work include:

• Three specialized transformer variants for RSS-based indoor localization.
• A plug-and-play knowledge transfer framework enabling cross-dataset generalization.
• A transformer-based IMU model with a particle-based motion representation mechanism for improved trajectory reconstruction.

These contributions significantly extend the applicability of transformer models in indoor positioning, navigation, and spatial computing.

Congratulations again to Dr. Son Minh Nguyen on this remarkable achievement, and best wishes for the next chapter of his career!