Author: Ng Chong

  • The Concordia Simulation Builder Is Now Open Source

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    Ng Chong

    In May we introduced the Concordia Simulation Builder, a web application developed at the United Nations University that makes Google DeepMind’s Concordia framework for generative agent-based simulation accessible without writing code. At the time, we promised the source code would be released once the accompanying paper was published. That day has come. Our paper, “Democratizing AI Social Simulation: A…

  • Following research into the halls of power: how we traced our work into policy

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    Ng Chong

    Every researcher knows the quiet thrill of a citation. Someone read your paper, found it useful, and built on it. But an academic citation only tells you that other academics noticed. It says nothing about whether your work reached the places where real decisions get made: a finance ministry’s budget, a global development strategy, a…

  • Local LLMs for Data Analysis: A Self-Correcting Agentic Loop

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    Ng Chong

     Not Smarter, Just Persistent: Local LLMs That Fix Their Own Work This is an account of building Lattice, our agentic data analyst. Lattice works across models (from frontier APIs to ones running on our own hardware) and across data sources, all behind a plain-language Q&A interface: a user asks in plain language, and Lattice works…

  • What the 2026 Stanford AI Index Report Tells Us About the State of AI

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    Ng Chong

    Every year, Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) publishes the AI Index Report, widely considered the most comprehensive, independent snapshot of where artificial intelligence actually stands. Now in its ninth edition, the report is produced by an interdisciplinary steering committee of academics and industry experts, and it pulls together data on everything from model performance…