Hi!👋 I'm Isaac.​

My focus is on making AI systems scalable and maintainable. Currently I'm a Staff Machine Learning Scientist at Zendesk QA (Klaus).

Previously at Clarifai, I led custom enterprise solution development for visual search and text moderation, built multi-modal retrieval systems, and led applied research in improving question-answering systems. I have spoken at various Python, ML conferences, and meet ups in Europe. My stack includes Python, Docker, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, and Go.

My background is in Aerospace Engineering and Machine Learning and I hold undergraduate (B.A.Sc in EngSci) and graduate (M.A.Sc) degrees from the University of Toronto.

I work remotely in Europe, currently based in Tallinn, Estonia. In my spare time, I try to contribute to open source projects (e.g. MTEB), see the world, and stay active. I used to race triathlons actively (a sneak peek here and here). These days I'm more into cycling, running, and hiking.

Papers​

• Kenneth Enevoldsen, Isaac Chung, Imene Kerboua, Márton Kardos et al. MMTEB: Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representation, 2025.
• Isaac Chung, Phat Vo, Arman C. Kizilkale, and Aaron Reite. Efficient In-Domain Question Answering for Resource-Constrained Environments. arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.17648, 2024.
• Elizaveta Korotkova and Isaac Chung. Beyond Toxic: Toxicity Detection Datasets are Not Enough for Brand Safety. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.15110, 2023.

Talks and Conferences​

• 2024 Swiss Python Summit (Zurich, Switzerland): Prototype to Production for RAG applications: Video | Slides
• 2024 Data Makers Fest (Porto, Portugal): Prototype to Production for RAG applications | Slides
• 2024 PyCon PL (Gliwice, Poland): Transcend the Knowledge Barriers in RAG | Slides
• 2024 PyCon LT (Vilnius, Lithuania): Speed up open source LLM-serving with llama-cpp-python | Video | Slides | Github
• 2024 PyCon LT (Vilnius, Lithuania): Transcend the Knowledge Barriers in RAG | Video | Slides
• 2023 TD Lab Live AI Talk (Remote): Beyond Llama2: Future Trends and Challenges with LLMs | Video | Slides
• 2023 EstoniAI Meetup Vol. 5 (Tallinn, Estonia): Panel Discussion on Recap AI developments and future trends
• 2022 ECIR Industry Day (Stavanger, Norway): Scaling Cross-Domain Content-Based Image Retrieval for E-commerce Snap and Search Application. Talk not recorded.
• 2021 Clarifai Perceive Conference (Remote): Automating Data Labeling for Deep Learning - AI-Automated Data Labeling | Video | Slides

Projects​

• Organizer @ PyData Tallinn
• Maintainer @ Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB)
• Strava Kudos Bot: https://github.com/isaac-chung/strava-kudos
• Open source contributions, such as
  • haystack
  • transformers
  • llama-index
  • auto-sklearn

Blogs​

• I log my learnings on Generative AI/ML in a blog and try to keep it within a 3-5min read
• Neptune LLMOps Blog on building RAG systems
• I have also written a few blogs for Clarifai.
  • Here are a few recent examples:

    • Supercharge your LLM via Retrieval Augmented Fine-tuning
    • The Landscape of Multimodal Evaluation Benchmarks
    • Do LLMs Reign Supreme In Few-Shot NER? Part III
    • Do LLMs Reign Supreme In Few-Shot NER? Part II
    • Do LLMs Reign Supreme In Few-Shot NER?
    • Multi-modal Moderation
    • A Comprehensive Guide To Vector Search

Consulting​

I'm open to provide consulting services in ML/AI. Send me an email, or reach out over LinkedIn.