Cheng

“Thinking big, aiming high, and making a difference were rules of the road embedded during my time at MIT,” says Irene Cheng, SM ’78, who went on to a successful Wall Street career as a managing director at Lazard Asset Management after earning a graduate degree in chemical engineering from the Institute. “I was helped along the way to reach these ambitions and hope to do the same for others. Who knows—someone whose life I touch may end up shaking the world one day.” Shedding light on the workings of the human brain:…

The top-seeded team of Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes won the AVP Huntington Beach Open Pro Series beach volleyball women’s competition in two sets Sunday, winning 21-18 in each.Trailing in the second match of the finals series 12-4, Cheng and Hughes fought back to take the lead and ultimately the winner’s trophy, defeating the fourth-seeded team of Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles.Coming into the tour, fan favorites Hughes and Cheng were also heavily favored to take the top prize. They’ve been on a run since reuniting last…

External Task Sensors stop bad data from trickling downstream in a data pipeline. Leverage them to create a reliable data infrastructure.External Task Sensors are like gatekeepers — they stop bad data from trickling downstream. Image by Freepik.Orchestrating a data pipeline is a delicate endeavor. In a data pipeline, we can have thousands of tasks running simultaneously and they are often dependent on one another. If we’re not careful, a single point of failure can have a domino-like effect that trickles downstream and…

Next week DC’s “We Are Legends” initiative formally kicks off with the release of Spirit World #1. The series comes from the creative team of writer Alyssa Wong, artist Haining, colorist Sebastian Chang, and letterer Janice Chiang. Picking up where a prelude story in February’s Lazarus Planet: Dark Fate one-shot left off, the new series follows Xanthe, a spirit envoy from the afterlife, as they work with John Constantine to find and rescue Batgirl Cassandra Cain, who has been pulled against her will into the titular…

Learn the fundamentals of TF-IDF and how to implement it from scratch in PythonPhoto by Aaron Burden on UnsplashFeature extraction is an important initial step in NLP, which involves transforming textual data into a mathematical representation, often in the form of vectors, known as word embeddings. Various word embedding approaches exist, ranging from classical approaches like word2vec and GloVe to more modern ones like BERT embeddings. While transformer-based embeddings dominate the field of NLP today, understanding the…

Photorealistic Generation of Anything You Can Think ofFigure 1. Text-to-Image Generation. Image made by author.If you are an avid follower of the newest CV papers, you would be surprised at the stunning results of generative networks in creating images. Many of the previous literature were based on the groundbreaking generative adversarial network (GAN) idea, but that’s no longer the case for recent papers. In fact, if you look closely at the newest papers such as ImageN and Staple Diffusion, you will constantly see a…

Beautiful and troubling photographs of how the world is changing and heating up are part of a competition to pressure one of the world’s leading camera companies to drop its controversial views on climate.Business accountability watchdog Action Speaks Louder launched the “Cameras Don’t Lie” competition in February in order to pressure photography giant Canon to distance itself from the climate denial the group says is being perpetuated at a nonprofit Canonsupports.“Canon has two faces; while branding itself as an…

Not all ML services are built the sameHidden technical debt in ML systems. Image by Google Developers.Not all ML services are built the same. As a consultant working in the public cloud, I can tell you that you are spoilt for options for Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) tooling on the 3 big public clouds — Azure, AWS, and GCP.It can be overwhelming to process and synthesize the wave of information; especially when these services are constantly coming out with new features.Just imagine how much of a…

There is no “best” looping technique in Python, only the most suitableImage by Chris Liverani from Unsplash.“What is the fastest looping technique in Python?”It’s a valid question, but often over-simplified. If there is a single looping method that is league above the rest, then the other techniques would have been deprecated.Fact is, there is no “best”.As with most things in life, there will be situations where one significantly outperforms the others, and in some other cases, it’s absolute garbage. They’re situational.…

Distill Fine-Grained Features Without SupervisionFigure 1. Self-supervised learning is an important step to true artifical intelligence. Image retrieved from Unsplash.Previously, I have written several articles briefly discussing self-supervised learning and, in particular, contrastive learning. What was not yet covered, however, was a concurrent branch of self-supervised approach using interactions of multiple networks that seems to emerge and excel recently. As of today, one of the state-of-the-art training methods is a…