Case Studies & Blog Posts

Chuong Ngo
July 4, 2024
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
Distributed Systems

Wrapping Up Kademlia

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

Consensus: Agree and Commit

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

TANGO: Triaging Takes Two

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

The Technology of Woobo

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