News

Store solar energy as liquid

A research group from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has made great, rapid strides towards the development of a specially designed molecule which can store solar energy for later use. These advances have been presented in four scientific articles this year, with the most recent being pub

Modernizing your build pipelines

Doing Continuous Integration is a lot easier if you have the right tools. In our project at a german car manufacturer, we were tasked with developing new services and bringing them to the cloud. We had a centralized Jenkins instance, shared by all the teams in the department.

A cure for cancer: how to kill a killer

Last month, the Nobel prize in medicine was awarded for two breakthrough scientific discoveries heralded as having “revolutionised cancer treatment”, and “fundamentally changed the way we view how cancer can be managed”. One of them went to a charismatic, harmonica-playing Texan named Jim Allison for his breakthrough advances in cancer immunotherapy. His discovery had resulted in transformative outcomes for cancer patients and a radical new direction for cancer research.

Tensorflow 2.0: models migration and new design

Tensorflow 2.0 will be a major milestone for the most popular machine learning framework: lots of changes are coming, and all with the aim of making ML accessible to everyone. These changes, however, requires for the old users to completely re-learn how to use the framework: this article describes all the (known) differences between the 1.x and 2.x version, focusing on the change of mindset required and highlighting the pros and cons of the new and implementations. This article can be a good starting point also for the novice: start thinking in the Tensorflow 2.0 way right now, so you don’t have to re-learn a new framework (unless until Tensorflow 3.0 will be released).

Horizon: An open-source reinforcement learning platform

Horizon is the first open source end-to-end platform that uses applied reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize systems in large-scale production environments. The workflows and algorithms included in this release were built on open frameworks — PyTorch 1.0, Caffe2, and Spark — making Horizon accessible to anyone using RL at scale. We’ve put Horizon to work internally over the past year in a wide range of applications, including helping to personalize M suggestions, delivering more meaningful notifications, and optimizing streaming video quality.

Peloton: Uber’s Unified Resource Scheduler for Diverse Cluster Workloads

Cluster management, a common software infrastructure among technology companies, aggregates compute resources from a collection of physical hosts into a shared resource pool, amplifying compute power and allowing for the flexible use of data center hardware. At Uber, cluster management provides an abstraction layer for various workloads. With the increasing scale of our business, the efficient use of cluster resources becomes very important.

A powerful new battery could give us electric planes that don’t pollute

October 21 GitHub post-incident analysis

Last week, GitHub experienced an incident that resulted in degraded service for 24 hours and 11 minutes. While portions of our platform were not affected by this incident, multiple internal systems were affected which resulted in our displaying of information that was out of date and inconsistent. Ultimately, no user data was lost; however manual reconciliation for a few seconds of database writes is still in progress.

Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study

New Theory of Intelligence May Disrupt AI and Neuroscience

Recent advancement in artificial intelligence, namely in deep learning, has borrowed concepts from the human brain. The architecture of most deep learning models is based on layers of processing– an artificial neural network that is inspired by the neurons of the biological brain. Yet neuroscientists do not agree on exactly what intelligence is, and how it is formed in the human brain — it’s a phenomena that remains unexplained.