News

Embodied Question Answering: A goal-driven approach to autonomous agents

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) has developed a collection of virtual environments for training and testing autonomous agents, as well as novel AI agents that learn to intelligently explore those environments. To test this goal-driven approach, FAIR are collaborating Georgia Tech on a multistep AI task called Embodied Question Answering, or EmbodiedQA.

ONNX expansion speeds AI development

Facebook helped develop the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format to allow AI engineers to more easily move models between frameworks without having to do resource-intensive custom engineering. Today, we’re sharing that ONNX is adding support for additional AI tools, including Apple Core ML converter technology, Baidu’s PaddlePaddle platform, and Qualcomm SNPE.

Google releases open source framework for building “enclaved” apps for cloud

Researchers find a gene that lets bacteria kill all male flies

Massive E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce turns deadly

Linux System Monitoring with eBPF

The Linux kernel is an abundant component of modern IT systems. It provides the critical services of hardware abstraction and time-sharing to applications. The classical metrics for monitoring Linux are among the most well known metrics in monitoring: CPU utilization, memory usage, disk utilization, and network throughput.

Altair: Declarative Visualization in Python

With Altair, you can spend more time understanding your data and its meaning. Altair’s API is simple, friendly and consistent and built on top of the powerful Vega-Lite visualization grammar. This elegant simplicity produces beautiful and effective visualizations with a minimal amount of code.

Airbnb Is Screwing Over New York’s Vulnerable Neighborhoods

Here in New York, where the city cracked down on short term rentals more than a hundred years ago, renting out your home for less than 30 days is illegal as of October 2016. But many landlords continue to rent out entire homes to tourists and visitors—today, 12,200 units are available on Airbnb in New York City in total—allowing them to reap in an income that’s higher than what they could make from renting those same units long term. That causes gaps in the housing market.

BBC – High Speed Networking: Open Sourcing Our Kernel Bypass Work

We Need Bug Bounties for Bad Algorithms

Algorithmic auditors are a growing discipline of researchers specializing in computer science and human-computer interaction. They employ a variety of methods to tinker with and uncover how algorithms work, and their research has already sparked public discussions and regulatory investigations into the most dominant and powerful algorithms of the Information Age. From Uber and Booking.com to Google and Facebook, to name a few, these friendly auditors already uncovered bias and deception in the algorithms that control our lives.