News

Introducing Uber Poet, an Open Source Mock App Generator for Determining Faster Swift Builds

Mapping roads through deep learning and weakly supervised training

Creating accurate maps today is a painstaking, time-consuming manual process, even with access to satellite imagery and mapping software. Many regions — particularly in the developing world — remain largely unmapped. To help close this gap, Facebook AI researchers and engineers have developed a new method that uses deep learning and weakly supervised training to predict road networks from commercially available high-resolution satellite imagery.

Supporting Dynamic Type at Airbnb

Since iOS 7, Dynamic Type has allowed users to choose a prefered font size for their phone. At Airbnb, we try to build an app that our entire community can use — since Dynamic Type is a critical accessibility feature, we knew supporting it would make more people able to effectively use our app, some of them probably for the first time. To validate the importance of this feature, we examined the data and saw as much as 30% of people using our app had a preferred font size that was not the default.

A Half Century Ago, Better Transistors and Switching Regulators Revolutionized the Design of Computer Power Supplies

Troubleshooting with Kiali

Recently I came across this excellent post from Cindy Sridharan, which throws a bunch of good ideas about how to improve the troubleshooting experience with microservices. I think that Kiali already has a good approach in that regard, which doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement. Kiali is meant to be the Istio console.

Unplugging From Digital Controls to Safeguard Power Grids

Late last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to mandate federal research on a radically ‘retro’approach to protect power grids from cyber attack: unplugging or otherwise isolating the most criticalequipment from grid operators’ digital control systems. Angus King, an independent senator from Maine whose identical bill passedthe Senate last month, says such a managed retreat from networked controls may berequired to thwart the grid’s most sophisticated online adversaries. Grid cyber experts say the Securing Energy Infrastructure Act moving through Congress isa particular testament toMichael Assante, a gifted and passionate cybersecurity expert whodied earlier this monthfrom leukaemia at the age of 48.

The Service Mesh: It’s About Traffic

Oliver Gould talks about the Linkerd project, a service mesh hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, to give operators control over the traffic between their microservices. He shares the lessons they’ve learned helping dozens of organizations get to production with Linkerd and how they’ve applied these lessons to tackle complexity with Linkerd.

Introducing EvoGrad: A Lightweight Library for Gradient-Based Evolution

Tools that enable fast and flexible experimentation democratize and accelerate machine learning research. Take for example the development of libraries for automatic differentiation, such as Theano, Caffe, TensorFlow, and PyTorch: these libraries have been instrumental in catalyzing machine learning research, enabling gradient descent training without the tedious work of hand-computing derivatives. In these frameworks, it’s simple to experiment by adjusting the size and depth of a neural network, by changing the error function that is to be optimized, and even by inventing new architectural elements, like layers and activation functions–all without having to worry about how to derive the resulting gradient of improvement.

Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 3

Welcome to part 3 in our series about secure control of egress traffic in Istio. In the first part in the series, I presented the attacks involving egress traffic and the requirements we collected for a secure control system for egress traffic. In the second part in the series, I presented the Istio way of securing egress traffic and showed how you can prevent the attacks using Istio.

How should pipelines be monitored?

For online serving systems it’s fairly well known that you should look for request rate, errors and duration. What about offline processing pipelines though? For a typical web application, high latency or error rates are the sort of thing you want to wake someone up about as they usually negatively affect the end-user’s experience.