GROWING THE DATA VISUALIZATION COMMUNITY WITH DECK.GL V5

Today, the Uber Visualization team open sourced deck.gl 5.3, the final deck.gl v5 release of our data visualization software. The v5 releases represent a major effort devoted to making deck.gl easier to use than ever before, and we hope that by sharing the story behind these improvements, we can get users excited to try out deck.gl v5’s new simplified APIs and features. While a lot of code required modification, the most important part of making deck.gl independent from React was deciding how the new non-React-based API should look.

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GDPR: PROGRAMMATIC AD BUYING PLUMMETS IN EUROPE

Since the early hours of May 25, ad exchanges have seen European ad demand volumes plummet between 25 and 40 percent in some cases, according to sources. Ad tech vendors scrambled to inform clients that they predict steep drops in demand coming through their platforms from Google. Some U.S. publishers have halted all programmatic ads on their European sites. Google contacted DoubleClick Bid Manager clients over the last few days to warn them that until it has completed its integration into the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe and IAB Tech Lab’s GDPR Transparency & Consent Framework that publishers, ad tech vendor partners and advertisers should expect a “short-term disruption” in the delivery of their DoubleClick Bid Manager campaigns on third-party European inventory, starting May 25. The frustration for many has been directed at Google. The day before the deadline, buyers were warned also to not buy any inventory via Google on third-party exchanges, especially those using tracking and ad-verification pixels, as Google couldn’t verify whether those partners were compliant or not, according to sources.

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OPENAI: GYM RETRO

We’re releasing the full version of Gym Retro, a platform for reinforcement learning research on games. This brings our publicly-released game count from around 70 Atari games and 30 Sega games to over 1,000 games across a variety of backing emulators. We’re also releasing the tool we use to add new games to the platform. We use Gym Retro to conduct research on RL algorithms and study generalization. Prior research in RL has mostly focused on optimizing agents to solve single tasks. With Gym Retro, we can study the ability to generalize between games with similar concepts but different appearances.

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BIRDS HAD TO RELEARN FLIGHT AFTER METEOR WIPED OUT DINOSAURS

Birds had to rediscover flight after the meteor strike that killed off the dinosaurs, scientists say. The cataclysm 66m years ago not only wiped out Tyrannosaurus rex and ground-dwelling dinosaur species, but also flying birds, a detailed survey of the fossil record suggests. As forests burned around the world, the only birds to survive were flightless emu-like species that lived on the ground.

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30+ MACHINE LEARNING RESOURCES

For almost all machine learning projects, the main steps of the ideal solution remain same. Briefly, we all go over the steps below each and every time: Understand the dataClean up, fix the missing values, extract new features, select the best onesBuild the model, compare it with the other ones, tune hyper parameters, find out what is the right metric to evaluate your modelIterate this process over and over again until you believe you have the best solution:) Iterate this process over and over again until you believe you have the best solution:)

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GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK ACCUSED OF BREAKING GDPR LAWS

Complaints against the web giants are filed on the first day of the EU’s new data protection law. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new EU law that changes how personal data can be collected and used. Even companies based outside the EU must follow the new rules if offering their services in the EU. In its four complaints, noyb.eu argues that the named companies are in breach of GDPR because they have adopted a ‘take it or leave it approach’. This, the organisation suggests, falls foul of the new rules because forcing people to accept wide-ranging data collection in exchange for using a service is prohibited under GDPR. The complaints were filed by four EU citizens with local regulators in Austria, Belgium, France and Germany.

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CHICAGO TIMES AND LA TIMES BLOCK EU USERS

Some high-profile US news websites are temporarily unavailable in Europe after new EU data protection rules came into effect. The Chicago Tribune and LA Times were among those saying they were currently unavailable in most European countries. Meanwhile complaints were filed against US tech giants within hours of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) taking effect. GDPR gives EU citizens more rights over how their information is used. It is an effort by EU lawmakers to limit tech firms’ powers. Under the rules, companies working in the EU – or any association or club in the bloc – must show they have a lawful basis for processing personal data, or face hefty fines.

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MUONS: THE LITTLE-KNOWN PARTICLES HELPING TO PROBE THE IMPENETRABLE

The muon is going mainstream. The particle, a heavy version of the electron that rains down on every square centimetre of Earth, is little known outside particle physics — and last year it helped archaeologists to make a stunning discovery of a previously unknown chamber in Egypt’s Great Pyramid1. Volcanologists and nuclear engineers are also finding new uses for the same technique, called muography, which harnesses muons to probe the innards of dense structures.

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MIT’S INTERESTING PROPOSAL FOR A MORE STABLE FINANCIAL SYSTEM

On the 16th of January 2018, three diamond firms approached Punjab National Bank requesting LOUs. (Letter of Understanding is a form of bank guarantee under which its customers can raise money from any other Indian bank’s foreign branch in the form of a short-term credit). Punjab National Bank demanded 100% cash margins (profitability) as a common requirement to issue LOUs. But, the firms responded back stating this requirement was not enforced for the previous LOUs they received since 2010. That’s when the Punjab National Bank got suspicious. Few bank employees had been issuing fake LOUs through the SWIFT system(Messaging system between banks).

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INTEL AI LAB OPEN-SOURCES LIBRARY FOR DEEP LEARNING-DRIVEN NLP

The Intel AI Lab has open-sourced a library for natural language processing to help researchers and developers give conversational agents like chatbots and virtual assistants the smarts necessary to function, such as name entity recognition, intent extraction, and semantic parsing to identify the action a person wants to take from their words. The first-ever conference by Intel for AI developers is being held Wednesday and Thursday, May 23 and 24, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The Intel AI Lab now employs about 40 data scientists and researchers and works with divisions of the company developing products like the nGraph framework and hardware like Nervana Neural Network chips, Liu said.

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