FASTER NEURAL NETWORKS STRAIGHT FROM JPEG
Uber AI Labs introduces a method for making neural networks that process images faster and more accurately by leveraging JPEG representations. Neural networks, an important tool for processing data in a variety of industries, grew from an academic research area to a cornerstone of industry over the last few years. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been particularly useful for extracting information from images, whether classifying them, recognizing faces, or evaluating board positions in Go.
Read moreKNATIVE: BRINGING SERVERLESS TO KUBERNETES EVERYWHERE
Knative, the open-source framework that provides serverless building blocks for Kubernetes, is on a roll, and GKE serverless add-on, the first commercial Knative offering that we announced this summer, is enjoying strong uptake with our customers. Today, we are announcing that we’ve updated GKE serverless add-on to support Knative 0.2. In addition, today at KubeCon, RedHat, IBM, and SAP announced their own commercial offerings based on Knative.
Read moreTHE BILLION DATA POINT CHALLENGE: BUILDING A QUERY ENGINE FOR HIGH CARDINALITY TIME SERIES DATA
Uber, like most large technology companies, relies extensively on metrics to effectively monitor its entire stack. From low-level system metrics, such as memory utilization of a host, to high-level business metrics, including the number of Uber Eats orders in a particular city, they allow our engineers to gain insight into how our services are operating on a daily basis. As our dimensionality and usage of metrics increases, common solutions like Prometheus and Graphite become difficult to manage and sometimes cease to work.
Read moreINTRODUCING SHIPPER
Booking.com is proud to announce the first public release of Shipper, an open source project that provides powerful, customizable rollouts to one or manyKubernetes clusters. Shipper uses Helm charts and native Kubernetes concepts to make it easy for anyone to set up blue/green or canary rollouts for their applications. The current release uses vanilla Kubernetes traffic shifting, so you don’t need a service mesh provider to get started.
Read moreSCIENTISTS DEVELOP 10-MINUTE UNIVERSAL CANCER TEST
Scientists have developed a universal cancer test that can detect traces of the disease in a patient’s bloodstream. The cheap and simple test uses a colour-changing fluid to reveal the presence of malignant cells anywhere in the body and provides results in less than 10 minutes. While the test is still in development, it draws on a radical new approach to cancer detection that could make routine screening for the disease a simple procedure for doctors.
Read moreDEEPMIND ACHIEVES HOLY GRAIL: AN AI THAT CAN MASTER GAMES LIKE CHESS AND GO WITHOUT HUMAN HELP
DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Alphabet, has createda system that can quickly master anygame in the classthat includes chess, Go, and Shogi, and do sowithouthuman guidance. The system, called AlphaZero, began its lifelast yearby beating a DeepMind system that had been specialized just for Go. That earlier system haditself made history by beating one of the world’s best Go players, but it needed human help to get through a months-long course of improvement.
Read moreINTRODUCING MAKISU: UBER’S FAST, RELIABLE DOCKER IMAGE BUILDER FOR APACHE MESOS AND KUBERNETES
To ensure the stable, scalable growth of our diverse tech stack, we leverage a microservices-oriented architecture, letting engineers deploy thousands of services on a dynamic, high-velocity release cycle. These services enable new features to greatly improve the experiences of riders, drivers, and eaters on our platform. Although this paradigm supported hypergrowth in both scale and application complexity, it resulted in serious growing pains given the size and scope of our business.
Read moreTHE U.S. NATIONAL ACADEMIES REPORTS ON THE PROSPECTS FOR QUANTUM COMPUTING
In November, IEEE Spectrum published an expert-written feature titled, “The Case Against Quantum Computing.” In it, the author, Mikhail Dyakonov, defended his view that practical general-purpose quantum computers would not be built anytime in the foreseeable future. As you might expect at this time of great enthusiasm for quantum computing, the article ruffled more than a few feathers. That committee released its 205-page report to the public yesterday, and experts from the committee conducted a webinar about it for reporters earlier in the day. Having edited “The Case Against Quantum Computing,” I was very much interested to find out what the group had concluded. Yet to their credit, the committee members did not sugar coat their assessment of the difficulties that they and other researchers face in their efforts to design and build practical, general-purpose quantum computers.
Read moreAMAZON INTRODUCES INTELLIGENT-TIERING FOR S3 STORAGE TO AUTOMATICALLY OPTIMIZE COSTS
Amazon introduces a new S3 Storage tier called Intelligent-Tiering which optimizes storage costs by automatically selecting the most cost-effective storage tier based on usage patterns. This new tier can help reduce costs for customers infrequently accessing their data in S3. Source: infoq.com
DOCKER APP AND CNAB
Docker App is a new tool we spoke briefly about back at DockerCon US 2018. We’ve been working on docker-app to make container applications simpler to share and easier to manage across different teams and between different environments, and we open sourced it so you can already download Docker App from GitHub at https://github.com/docker/app. In talking to others about problems they’ve experienced sharing and collaborating on the broad area we call “applications” we came to a realisation: it’s a more general problem that others have been working on too.
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