Interview with Khoa Duy Nguyen
Github: @khoaguin
Where are you based?
Currently, I am based in Dalat, a beautiful mountain town in Vietnam.
What do you do (i.e. studying, working, etc.)?
I am currently a part-time engineer at OpenMined and a part-time researcher in privacy-preserving machine learning.
What are your specialties (i.e. Python development, Javascript development, community organization, etc.)?
Engineering wise, I would say Python development. Research wise, my work involves distributed learning (e.g. split learning, federated learning) and secure computation techniques (e.g. homomorphic encryption).
How and when did you originally come across OpenMined?
I came across OpenMined about 3 years ago while looking for a tool to build a secure split learning protocol for my research, and I have been involved with the community since then.
What was the first thing you started working on within OpenMined?
I think it was a testing session for PySyft 0.7.0.
And what are you working on now?
Nowadays, I am working on building PySyft’s back-end system with Python.
What would you say to someone who wants to start contributing?
I would recommend to look into the library, install it and mess around with the notebooks to see what it’s about. Then if you are interested, pick up some issues on github and apply to the padawan program. I have learned a lot being a padawan myself, it was fun and challenging at the same time.
Please recommend one interesting book, podcast or resource to the OpenMined community.
Having a background as a researcher, I was quite overwhelmed learning all the tools and systems around the PySyft’s ecosystem. I have been reading the “Designing Data-Intensive Application” (Martin Kleppmann) and “System Design Interview – An Insider’s Guide” (Alex Xu) books and find them to be very helpful.