UIUC Computer Science

Duy Anh Hong ✦ software engineer ✦ Welcome to my portfolio

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What do you want to know?

Client-side hybrid search (BM25 + dense rank fusion) across my portfolio. Press / to search.

How this works

Two retrievers score every chunk independently. BM25 is sparse keyword matching over an inverted index — good at exact terms, blind to wording it has not seen. Dense is latent semantic: the corpus TF-IDF matrix is factored by truncated SVD at build time, and the right singular vectors ship as a term-to-latent projection, so your query is embedded here by a matrix multiply rather than a model download or an API call. That is why it answers in a fraction of a millisecond and works offline.

The two rankings are merged with reciprocal rank fusion, score = Σ 1/(60 + rank), which is the same fusion strategy behind the sub-50ms clause retrieval in the DIGIIN work below. Query terms are expanded before scoring, so kubernetes reaches the Docker line; expansion matches are the dotted underlines.

About me.

Duy Anh Hong

I’m Duy Anh, a CS student at UIUC. I build software and explore what it takes for AI agents to do useful work reliably. Away from the keyboard, I’m a national-record swimmer and a classical-piano nerd working through Chopin and Beethoven.

🏊 Vietnam Gold Medalist & record holder 🏆 HackIllinois 2026 Winner ⚡ Codeforces Expert — top 10% 🎓 GPA 3.95 / 4.0

Education.

UIUC
University

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

B.S. Computer Science

GPA 3.95 / 4.0 · Dean's List (all semesters)

Activities: ACM SIGRobotics · ACM SIGICPC

Selected Coursework: Applied Parallel Computing, System Programming, Database Systems, Numerical Methods

VNU-HCM
High School

VNU-HCM High School for the Gifted

Informatics (CS specialization)

SAT 1560 / 1600

  • Bronze Medal — National Olympiad in Informatics (Central & Highlands, 2023)
  • Honorable Mention — ICPC Vietnam National 2022 & 2023
  • Vietnam National Swimming Gold Medalist & record holder
  • Co-founder & President — Intellectual Showdown (150+ members, 8 contests)
  • Board of Directors — The Gifted Battlefield ($8K+ sponsorships, 300-person org)

My techstack.

All the tools (still counting) I use to build fast, intelligent software.

My experience.

DIGIINHCMUSSoftware Engineer Intern

DIGIIN – Software Engineering Lab, VNU-HCM

Jul 2026 — Present

Engineered hybrid Qdrant dense & BM25 clause retrieval (<50ms across 680+ policies) using the same rank fusion architecture that powers this portfolio's search bar. Accelerated an insurtech assistant on vLLM (Qwen3-14B) by 40% via async tool calling and closed-loop error recovery.

Research Assistant

STAPL · Parasol Lab @ UIUC

Apr 2026 — Aug 2026

Optimized container runtime performance for the STAPL parallel C++ framework in HPC environments. Profiled proxy-layer indirection with GDB & Valgrind/Callgrind, cutting indirection overhead to achieve a 5x benchmark speedup on subscript access.

The BookerSoftware Engineer Intern

The Booker

Apr 2026 — Jul 2026

Architected the event-driven backend for a multi-tenant AI receptionist, offloading Twilio & Meta webhooks to async workers via Redis Streams with tenant session isolation, message redelivery, and a strict <2s SLA.

My projects.

Take a look at some of the passion projects I've built.

Pacific — Personal Context Recommender

Personal Context Engine · Screen Telemetry · Retrieval · Multimodal Ranking

Built an ambient personal context assistant that observes active screen workflow, surfaces relevant notes, past conversations, and collaborator context, and floats draggable cards for one-click prompt augmentation in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

▶ 2x Speed Demo

AdmitArc

⚡ Live

College Admissions & Decision Analytics · React · TypeScript · FastAPI · PostgreSQL

Built a full-stack college admissions analytics platform with React, TypeScript, FastAPI, and normalized PostgreSQL featuring filterable decision dashboards and user-scoped data isolation.

admitarc.vercel.app ↗ open

SignEd

🔬 Research

Text-to-Sign Generation · PyTorch · Seq2Seq · VQ-VAE · SMPL-X

Engineered a text-to-sign language generation system at the Software Engineering Lab, VNU-HCM, adapting pretrained seq2seq models with a motion tokenization pipeline that discretizes continuous SMPL-X pose sequences into body- and hand-specific token streams, decoded autoregressively with retrieval-augmented sign-dictionary lookups.

3D mesh reconstruction · original (blue) vs. tokenizer reconstruction (red)

CATCare

🏆 Best Beginner Hack — HackIllinois 2026

Agentic Machinery Inspection · Google ADK · FastAPI · WebSockets · PyTorch

Built an agentic heavy machinery inspection assistant via Google ADK and FastAPI using plan-and-act workflows and closed-loop tool reflection to heal malformed payloads.

KFChat

Conversational Ordering Assistant · Python · AsyncIO · REST APIs · JSON Schema · pytest

Built an asynchronous REST API and state layer for an automated food ordering assistant, enforcing idempotency and strict JSON Schema validation across webhooks with <200ms latency and 95%+ test coverage.

Old English Translator

Low-Resource Translation Pipeline · Python · PyTorch · BERT · Transformers · TF-IDF

Developed a low-resource translation pipeline in PyTorch using a frozen BERT encoder and Transformer decoder, boosting BLEU from 12.0 to 63.48 over the TF-IDF baseline.

AI Challenge HCMC

Top 10% Finalist

Semantic Video Retrieval · CLIP · FAISS · TransNetV2

Delivered sub-second semantic video search across 200+ hours of footage by extracting keyframes with TransNetV2 and indexing CLIP embeddings with FAISS.

My impact.

More than side projects — two organizations I co-founded to change how gifted students in Vietnam learn, compete, and lift each other up.

Intellectual Showdown

Co-founder & President

Built a competitive programming community grown to a 100-member organization, coordinating a 30-person team across 8 contests, an in-person finale for ~100 students (now in its 3rd edition), and live streams with 7,000+ views.

Event & Community Photos
Intellectual Showdown — 150+ Member Community & Student Mentorship Intellectual Showdown — La Grande Finale 2023 Stage Award Ceremony Intellectual Showdown — Live Problem-Solving & Contest Presentation

The Gifted Battlefield

Board of Directors

Jun 2023 — Oct 2024 · Student Org · 300-person

Scaled a 300-person student organization across Saigon, raising $8K+ in sponsorships and organizing academic workshops and mock exams with 300+ attendees per event.

Academic Workshops & Mock Exams
The Gifted Battlefield — Academic Workshop & Leadership The Gifted Battlefield — Organizing Committee Team The Gifted Battlefield — Mock Exam Session with 300+ Students

My contact.

I'm always open to high-impact collaborations.

Or directly email me at dahong2@illinois.edu