Case Studies & Blog Posts

Chuong Ngo
November 21, 2024
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Artificial Intelligence

Attention Mechanisms: Putting Things Into Focus

You can't just see. You have to know what and where to look.
Chuong Ngo
July 4, 2024
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Distributed Systems

Searching for Trust

How do you find your way in the dark? How do you progress in an uncertain world?
Chuong Ngo
June 2, 2022
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Distributed Systems

Wrapping Up Kademlia

Sometimes, you need to tread ground that you have already walked.
Chuong Ngo
May 26, 2022
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Distributed Systems

Kademlia: There Is Always An Option

There is more than one way to skin a cat and find stuff in a P2P network.
Chuong Ngo
May 19, 2022
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Distributed Systems

Chord: Finding a Needle in a Haystack

How do you find a needle in a haystack? Let's keep it simple. Why complicate things?
Chuong Ngo
April 21, 2022
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Encryption

RSA: A Long Time Coming

RSA was patented in 1983 and has since become a cornerstone of secure communications in the modern world. How does it work?
Chuong Ngo
April 14, 2022
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Encryption

Asymmetric Encryption: Just a Trap Door Away

What does it take to communicate privately in peace? Lots of math and several decades of research.
Chuong Ngo
April 7, 2022
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Encryption

SHA-256: The Cool Kid on the Block

Our modern digital world depends on it. Few other software is more implemented. It is SHA-256.
Chuong Ngo
March 31, 2022
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Encryption

Cryptographic Hash Functions: Security Through Obfuscation

Sometimes, you want to go somewhere where everybody knows your name, but not who you are.
Chuong Ngo
March 17, 2022
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Distributed Systems

Paxos: Who Wants To Legislate All Day?

Sometimes, we have to find a way to work with the unreliable. How?
Chuong Ngo
March 10, 2022
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Distributed Systems

Consensus: Agree and Commit

What can you do when different entities can agree? Quite a lot.
Chuong Ngo
February 24, 2022
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Engineering

UIMA JCas Repository Service: Checkpointing for UIMA

Theories do not pay the bills. In the real world, we need something we can use.
Chuong Ngo
February 17, 2022
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Engineering

UIMA's Checkpointing Problem

We live in an imperfect world. So let’s hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
Chuong Ngo
February 10, 2022
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Engineering

TANGO: Triaging Takes Two

It’s playful and vibrant. It’s TANGO... because bug triaging takes two.
Chuong Ngo
April 29, 2021
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Artificial Intelligence

Neural Network Compositionality: A Sum of Its Parts

Machine learning means that a computer can learn from experience without being specifically programmed. But, is the computer learning the right things?
Chuong Ngo
April 15, 2021
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Artificial Intelligence

Transformers: The Nuts and Bolts

Gears, servos, and circuits, oh my! So, many things go into a Transformer! So many things to examine! Oh...wait...that’s the wrong Transformer.
Chuong Ngo
April 8, 2021
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Artificial Intelligence

Transformers: An Unexpected NLP Revolution

When you need to go faster, but RNNs cannot keep up. Whom do you call? Transformers, of course.
Chuong Ngo
April 1, 2021
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Artificial Intelligence

Convolutional Neural Networks: Machine Learning's Eye

Let’s take a step back and examine a machine learning architecture that has become the go-to for image recognition and computer vision.
Chuong Ngo
March 25, 2021
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Artificial Intelligence

NTM: Memories Under the Hood

Memory is essential to NTMs. So, understanding NTMs’ memory addressing system is a must.
Chuong Ngo
March 18, 2021
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Artificial Intelligence

Neural Turing Machine: The Power of Memory

We have added attention and gates to our neural networks. Now, let’s revolutionize machine learning with memory.
Chuong Ngo
March 11, 2021
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Artificial Intelligence

Gated Recurrent Unit: The Other White Meat

LSTMs fix vanishing and exploding gradients, but LSTMs are not the only architectures that do that.
Chuong Ngo
March 4, 2021
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Artificial Intelligence

The Long Short-Term Memory Network

LSTMs are widely used in machine learning now. What are they? How do they work?
Chuong Ngo
February 25, 2021
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Artificial Intelligence

Backpropagation: Training Neural Networks

Backpropagation is so commonplace in neural network training that it is easy to take it for granted. But what is it?
Chuong Ngo
February 18, 2021
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Retrospective

The Technology of Woobo

Transforming a toy prototype into a market-ready AI product requires plenty of technology.
Chuong Ngo
February 11, 2021
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Retrospective

Bringing Woobo To Life

What does it take to bring Woobo to life? Lots and lots of elbow grease.
Chuong Ngo
February 4, 2021
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Artificial Intelligence

Generalizable Variations of the Attention Mechanism

Applying the attention principle to more tasks meant that the attention mechanism had to be modified.
Chuong Ngo
December 1, 2020
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Artificial Intelligence

The Attention Mechanism for Neural NLP Models

The attention mechanism has become widespread in neural NLP modeling, but where did it come from?